August 19, 2019 – Skyhaven Systems was awarded a contract from NASA to develop a new Phase Change Material (PCM) based heat exchanger for NASA’s Orion and lunar lander spacecraft. NASA is interested in more sophisticated thermal control technologies that can operate in severe environments with a wide range of heat loads. Effective heat rejection is needed for a number of NASA missions especially those associated with planetary and lunar orbits where extreme temperature differences due to lighted versus dark regions challenge radiator systems. A phase change material (PCM) based heat exchanger is being developed for space craft systems that incorporates newly developed micro-encapsulated phase change materials. These PCMs developed at Skyhaven have both high thermal conductivity and high thermal storage capability, mutual benefits that have alluded PCMs in prior systems. PCM beads have been produced that consist of paraffin wax or n-pentadecane encapsulated in copper. These micro-encapsulated beads have high thermal conductivity via the exterior metallic shell that physically constrains volume expansion during a change of phase of the wax or n-pentadecane medium. New manufacturing methods are being developed to produce these PCM beads in high volume applying them to NASA’s Orion spacecraft. These PCM beads offer substantive mass improvements to the current Orion phase change heat exchanger by eliminating internal conductive fin structures reducing the mass by 50% for the same energy storage capacity.