Liquid Shielding

Abstract

Space presents multiple obstacles to the effective use of commercial electronics. Radiation damages components causing transient errors, destructive latch-up, and unrecoverable loss of function. The vacuum of space precludes effective use of convection for heat dissipation, causes outgassing, and material degradation. Shock and vibration of launch causes mechanical damage. For space-grade electronics, these problems are currently solved with expensive materials and custom designs, including insulating substrates and larger-nanometer processes. The production volumes of spacecraft cannot effectively amortize nonrecurring costs making aerospace avionics expensive, with long lead times and compute performance orders-of-magnitude slower than terrestrial products from Intel, NVIDIA, Raspberry Pi, and others. We propose the use of non-conductive fluid shielding as an inexpensive, effective means of protecting terrestrial products from the challenging space environment. Using a pressure vessel, a bath can be formed around electronics that shields from radiation, protects materials from vacuum, dampens shock and vibration characteristics, and increases thermal mass. We document this approach and discuss its benefit as it relates to total dose failure, single event effects, mechanical failures and thermal. Through simulation and analysis, we show terrestrial electronics, offering 100x existing processing performance at 1/10thof the cost, can be safely deployed in space by this technique.