Evaluation of effective emissivity based on manufacturing and mounting scheme for space-borne multilayer insulation

Effective emissivity, a performance evaluation metric for multilayer insulation (MLI), is used to determine heat loss from satellites to outer space, thus minimizing the power required for heaters. In this study, an experiment is conducted in a high-vacuum environment with a pressure below 3.75 × 10⁻⁵ torr to determine the effects of the manufacturing and mounting scheme for MLI on the effective emissivity. The effective emissivity was quantitatively evaluated by varying the manufacturing and mounting scheme according to the number and area of the filler layers, i.e., the internal insulation layers of the MLI. The results revealed that the reduction rate of effective emissivity tends to decrease with the increase in the number of filler layers, thus achieving an efficient insulation performance for MLI with 10–20 filler layers. Additionally, for MLI with the same number of filler layers, effective emissivity increased by 48 % with the decrease in the layer area.