Preliminary Results on Fully-Printed and Silver-Based Temperature Sensors for Aerospace Industry

CubeSats are small satellites produced usually by off-the-shelf components that are designed to propose space exploration and research to universities reducing expenses and development time. Since most of their components are commercial and temperatures in space range between −100 °C and 120 °C, the thermal profile of the devices must be considered in the design process to optimize the efficiency and to avoid system failures. Among the different kinds of temperature sensors reported in the literature, the use of printed resistance temperature detectors (RTDs) is interesting to embed the sensor in the structure thus reducing the weight of the satellite. In this frame, the use of innovative Industry 4.0 technologies allows both the improvement of the metrological characteristics of the sensors and the reduction of the costs increasing the material use efficiency. In this work, two aluminum alloys and three plastic were tested as substrates for the development of printed silver-based temperature sensors. The sensors were characterized in the [−10; 100] °C temperature range using both an oven and a climatic chamber in order to assess the resistance at 0 °c, the temperature coefficient of resistance (TCR) as well as the hysteresis of the devices. The results showed that the metallic substrates performed better, with TCRs bigger than 2.5 $10-3^{\circ}\mathrm{C}^{-1}$ and low hysteresis. Among the plastic substrates, Kapton produced the most stable TCRs values with values around $2.3\cdot 10-3\circ \mathrm{C}-1$. Even though ABS performed similarly (TCR around $2.0\cdot 10-3^{\circ}\mathrm{C}^{-1}$), it presented linearity and hysteresis issues at high temperatures.