Water-cooled 5-10 kW X-Band SSPA

September 2021 – ongoing

In the currently ongoing project for European Space Agency, SpaceForest designs and manufactures water-cooled 5-10 kW X-Band Solid-State Power Amplifier (SSPA).

  • SpaceForest logo.
  • TRUMPF home.
  • Fraunhofer IAF home.
  • ESA home.

Presently in ESA Deep Space Antennas X-Band uplink capability is achieved by different power amplifiers: air-cooled Solid State Power Amplifiers (400 W), air-cooled Low Power Amplifiers (2 kW), and water-cooled High Power Amplifiers (20 kW). 

The new Solid State Power Amplifier (SSPA) shall implement water-cooling allowing for better temperature stabilization (therefore frequency stability), quieter operations, more efficiency (primarily at high altitude), and reduced overall size, in comparison to air-cooling. The development of the 5 kW amplifier will reduce running costs being both the present 400 W SSPA and 2 kW LPA replaced by only the new 5 kW SSPA. The intention is to further extend the output power range up to 10 kW, thus the preliminary design of the 10 kW amplifier will also be performed in the frame of this activity.

Project implemented in the consortium:

1. TRUMPF Hüttinger  – consortium leader

2. SpaceForest sp. z o.o.

3. Fraunhofer – Institut für Angewandte Festkörperphysik IAF