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Near-field radiation assisted smart skin for spacecraft thermal control

Thermal control is of critical importance for normal operation of spacecraft. Given thermal radiation is the only means of heat dissipation in space, an efficient thermal control approach for spacecraft is to coat the radiator with a tunable-emittance "skin" that can tune its heat dissipation according to various thermal conditions. The existing schemes solely relying on far-field thermal radiation, which are based on mechanical, electrochromic or thermochromic working principles, are difficult to combine the advantages of all-solid-state structure, actively and accurate tuning, and large tuning range of heat flux. In this work, we propose a near-field radiation assisted (NFRA) smart skin for thermal control which can tune the heat rejection accurately and in a large range. It contains a metal-insulator-semiconductor (MIS) structure, where the carrier distribution in the semiconductor layer can be electrically altered. In this way, the near-field heat flux, and ultimately the skin emission power expressed using effective emittance, can be controlled as a function of the applied voltage. The variation range of the effective emittance can exceed 0.7 when adjusting the applied voltage from -10 V to 100 V with our preliminary design. This work opens a new way of smart skin design for active spacecraft thermal control.