Investigation on environmental adaptation of polyimide film in space applications

Polyimide films have high strength, low density, excellent thermal stability, good insulating properties, excellent UV stability and infrared transmittance, and are widely used in thermal control structures on spacecraft, solar arrays and other components, as well as solar sails and other inflatable deployment structures, and the commonly used films include aluminized polyimide films, antistatic aluminized polyimide films, germanium plating polyimide films, and carburized black polyimide films, etc. Due to long-term exposure to the various space environments, their properties will be seriously degraded, such as thermo-optical properties, electrical properties, and mechanical properties. In this paper, for the application of polyimide film in spacecraft, we analyze the application performance requirements, introduce the influence of space environment on film materials. For these above materials, the results of the study of the degradation of the performance of these polyimide films under the action of space particle radiation, solar ultraviolet radiation, atomic oxygen and other environments were presented.