Post Processing Graphical User Interface for Thermal Desktop Binary Output

Thermal Desktop (TD) is an industry-standard thermal analysis tool used to create and analyze thermal models for landers, rovers, spacecraft, and instrument payloads. Currently, limited software exists to extract and visualize metrics relevant to heat flow within TD, impeding thermal engineers from analyzing their results quickly. This paper discusses a graphical user interface (GUI) built in MATLAB and C++, which uses TD’s application programming interface (API), OpenTD, and a custom parser to address this void. Specifically, we present a method for efficiently loading temperature, conductance, and submodel metrics by utilizing an exploit found in the binary structure of TD’s Compressed Solution Results (CSR) files, which reduces the runtime for correlating model nodes and conductors with submodel IDs by orders of magnitude. We lastly reflect on shortcomings of this method for reading data, consider the future of the GUI, and provide recommendations for future OpenTD releases.