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8:00 am
March 4, 2010
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Luke Maurits
| | Adelaide, Australia | |
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Does anyone here know much about diving rebreathers? I find the idea of using one of these as part of our life support system extremely appealing, for a lot of obvious reasons. I'm just wondering if we can make it work with our design. Obviously rebreaters are designed to be used with a tightly sealed mouthpiece in an underwater or vacuum environment. This is different to what we want, which is the astronaut breathing freely in a cabin. This is quite a naive idea, but could we take a rebreather and attach the mouthpiece to a pump which breathed in to / out off the cabin through a small pump, and expect it to work?
The biggest potential problem I can think of with this is that CO2 scrubbing might happen too slowly: if the astronaut exhales one breath's worth of CO2 into the cabin, it diffuses throughout the atmosphere and when the rebreather "breathes in" from the cabin it's only going to get a small portion of that breath of CO2, so the CO2 level will steadily rise. Could we counter this by having the pump attached to the mouthpiece "breathe" faster than usual, or would this just overwhelm the CO2 scrubber?
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Main CLLARE workgroups: Mission Planning, Navigation and Guidance. I do maths, physics, C, Python and Java.
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9:06 am
March 4, 2010
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Rocket-To-The-Moon
| | Altus, Oklahoma, USA | |
| Member | posts 685 | |
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I don't think there is any inherent reason why the pump must both inhale and exhale. It appears that the gas flow is in one direction. After watching the video below it looks like all we need is the canister that contains the sodium hydroxide. We would probably want to develop our own canister that contains an appropriate amount of the substance (I believe you ran calculations that determined how much was needed) so that it will last the duration of the mission +10%.
The second step of the puzzle is the control of the partial pressure of oxygen in the cabin. A rebreather takes care of this automatically and it might be useful to directly use the oxygen sensors and control valves from a rebreather to control the flow of oxygen.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v…..KPy0_UDa68
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Main Workgroups: Propulsion & Spacecraft Engineering
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11:51 pm
March 11, 2010
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brmj
| | Rochester, New York, United States | |
| Member | posts 402 | |
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Post edited 11:52 pm – March 11, 2010 by brmj
I think we should ask the Copenhagen Suborbitals about life support. Their space ship won't be too relevant, but I bet the submarine experience is directly applicable to an even greater degree than diving rebreathers would be.
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Main work groups: Propulsion (booster), Spacecraft Engineering, Computer Systems, Navigation and Guidance (software)
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3:04 am
March 12, 2010
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Luke Maurits
| | Adelaide, Australia | |
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| posts 1483 | |
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brmj said:I think we should ask the Copenhagen Suborbitals about life support. Their space ship won't be too relevant, but I bet the submarine experience is directly applicable to an even greater degree than diving rebreathers would be.
I will take the initiative on this, if nobody minds. I have had a growing mental list of questions for the CS guys, and this is a good chance to dump them all:
- How does life support on Tycho Brahe work? (question from today)
- What is the total empty mass of the Tycho Brahe spacecraft? (to let us see how many clustered HEATs would be needed to do suborbital flights of the CLLARE CM)
- What is the specific impulse of the epoxy fuel grain used in HEAT?
- How did you go about casting paraffin fuel grains?
- Did you ever fly any paraffin fuelled engines and if so did you have any problems with the grain "slumping"?
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Main CLLARE workgroups: Mission Planning, Navigation and Guidance. I do maths, physics, C, Python and Java.
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7:48 am
March 12, 2010
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brmj
| | Rochester, New York, United States | |
| Member | posts 402 | |
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Unfortunately, I suspect that Tycho Brahe just uses bottles of pressurized gas, since it won't be up for long, though I could easilly be wrong. However, Peter Madsen of CS has built at least three submarines. I don't know if they just use a snorkal for air, or if they have a true life support system, but if it is the latter it would almost certainly be quite relevant to CLLARE.
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Main work groups: Propulsion (booster), Spacecraft Engineering, Computer Systems, Navigation and Guidance (software)
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