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4:17 am
December 29, 2009
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Luke Maurits
| | Adelaide, Australia | |
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| posts 1483 | |
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I've become slightly nervous about the prospect of just relying on our bank of fuel cells for power. While the individual fuel cells are surely reliable enough that no more than one or two may fail on a single mission, a temporary loss of oxygen flow to their pressure vessel would soon leave the CM completely powerless, which would be a Very Bad Thing. I think it would be quite prudent to have a small set of batteries on board that we could switch to in the event of a fuel cell failure so we have some time to figure out how to fix things. After such an event the batteries could be recharged by the functioning fuel cells to allow for future failures.
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Main CLLARE workgroups: Mission Planning, Navigation and Guidance. I do maths, physics, C, Python and Java.
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8:18 am
December 29, 2009
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Rocket-To-The-Moon
| | Altus, Oklahoma, USA | |
| Member | posts 685 | |
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Having a battery is definitely something that is necessary from a basic safety standpoint. Ideally the battery should be able to power essential equipment from the TLI burn through a free return trajectory. Essential equipment probably includes at least the main computer and navigation system along with periodic pings of telemetry data.
I think that it is also worth having the CM or extension modules covered in solar modules. This would limit the amount of fuel that we need to carry for the fuel cells along with adding a third power source for redundancy (fuel cells, battery, solar). As with everything there is a trade off, do we carry more weight in solar and limit FC fuel or do we not have solar and maximize the FC fuel?
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Main Workgroups: Propulsion & Spacecraft Engineering
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9:23 am
December 29, 2009
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Luke Maurits
| | Adelaide, Australia | |
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| posts 1483 | |
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The solar idea is definitely something to think about. If nothing else, it means that if the shit really hits the fan we should be able to get enough power from the sun to keep things minimally powered up indefinitely, which shifts the deciding factor in "How long do we have to mount a rescue before the astronaut dies?" to something else – probably oxygen/CO2 concerns.
All of this raises an important point to bear in mind – the subsystems and control interface should be designed to give the pilot fine-grained control over power levels. It should be possible to switch every subsystem to low-power settings individually so that we can draw limited power out as long as possible in an emergency situation.
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Main CLLARE workgroups: Mission Planning, Navigation and Guidance. I do maths, physics, C, Python and Java.
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