Experimental study of space lubricant evaporation in a high vacuum environment

The liquid lubricant evaporation in space applications poses significant challenges, raising the risk of inaccurate estimation of lubricant implementation and the potential contamination of satellite subsystems. The study of vacuum evaporation becomes highly relevant with the increasing use of liquid lubricants in satellite constellations. This research presents a novel methodology for assessing the lubricant evaporation rate, focusing on establishing a correlation between existing analytical models and experimental measurements. The obtained experimental results clearly demonstrate a disparity between the existing analytical models and the measured evaporated mass of vacuum base oils. Importantly, these results indicate higher evaporation rates predicted by the analytical approach. This emphasises the importance of refining the analytical models to accurately predict the amount of liquid lubricant evaporated.