El Plan B

Awards & Nominations

El Plan B has received the following awards and nominations. Way to go!

Global Nominee

Long Duration Recharge Station for Venus Missions (Recharge Monumment)

High-Level Project Summary

A Long Duration Recharging Station designed to be capable of recharging/supplying power to a rover and lander for approximately 28 years, as well as being resistant to the extreme weather conditions of the planet Venus, was developed.To solve the problem we brainstormed to evaluate all the necessary aspects for the survival of a recharging station in the hostile environment of Venus, we used the resources provided by NASA to have a better understanding of these problems we would have.Understanding the above mentioned, we began to search through the NASA platform for information that would be useful to us and that would allow us to solve this problem, achieving little by little to success.

Link to Final Project

https://drive.google.com/file/d/108aVl_I3PjhgZuAOxP9T5QgHJ0b7ETFp/view?usp=sharing

Link to Project "Demo"

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1I1apC1aT0T0IuO_Lj5_HgDNMf1f1hd-M/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=101238319656560839145&rtpof=true&sd=true

Detailed Project Description

Our proposal is a Long Duration Recharge Station for Missions on Venus (also called Recharge Monumment) where it is a static station that allows the charging of energy to Rovers and launch stations either by means of the coupling to the connectors that are the black spheres where they are charged with the stored energy of Lithium-Sulfur batteries. And in the case of rovers the previous system can be used, however, also our station is designed to change the MMRTG generators of current Rovers that use this kind of batteries. Inside the device there are 5 Plutonium-238 MMRTG generators, 3 deactivated which will be the spare parts for the rovers and 2 generators of which only one will be on, taking care of the entire electrical system, supplying heat to the places where it will be needed and charging the 6 lithium-sulfur batteries which is where it will be stored, all this being able to survive the extreme surface of Venus.

As benefits it has a lifetime of approximately 28 years, it is completely resistant to all the hostile characteristics of Venus resolving it in the following way:

an armor of iconel 625, a metal resistant to 1098° degrees centigrade, which makes it virtually immune to that heat, in addition to ensure the protection of what is inside which are electronic circuits, motors that are responsible for moving a moving part that is located on the top for the landing platform load that land around it.

It has grade 5 titanium (Ti64) that will protect and hold everything in place, 2 stepper motors will function as an elevator system for the generators once the top has been delivered.

It is hoped that this will help NASA to be able to do more special explorations to Venus and discover all the secrets that Venus has to find.

As for the equipment used several laptos were used for the search of information, PowerPoint was used for the presentation of the project, for the 3d modeling Fusion360 was used here was where the different images were made except the last one and those of the energy coupling, to build a model a 3d printer was used in which a model of the prototype was printed to test it to the judges and to make the gcode file to print the model I used Cura 4.13.1. And Paintool SAI for a draw.

Space Agency Data

For the use of NASA data we use the resources to gather knowledge and information that has been collected by NASA and is applicable to our project. Several research articles on future work and research in progress were of vital importance to us because that information gave us an idea of what we were facing in terms of the hostility of the planet venus, however, there was also information on possible solutions (some viable, some not so viable) that could be of use to us. All our knowledge of the MMRTG generators and materials of the shield is due to several NASA articles that talk about them in a specific way or to refer to some advance that they are looking to implement in the future.

Hackathon Journey

It was a rewarding experience to participate in this event along with friends I already know and some new ones I made when it came time to include them in my team. I learned a lot about Venus, construction materials, corrosive gases, MMRTG generators, hardness of materials, various interesting topics presented by the other teams, I can assure you that I have never read so much in my life as in these events. We chose this challenge because we found very interesting the whole context of Venus and the goal of putting an energy storage system on a planet as hostile as Venus, so we decided to try our luck.

Basically we approached it in such a way that each solution we gave to a problem in the Venus environment was complemented by another, so that all the solutions we got could be merged to develop the ultimate solution to all the problems and meet the challenge.

Basically the setbacks were solved as a team either by exchanging tasks, supporting the partner and encouraging him not to give up.

I thank my family and my school for letting me participate in such demanding, interesting and fun events, as well as my teammates who agreed to work with me in the first place (because no one wanted to team up with me), I really appreciate the effort and dedication they put into the event, I have no words.

References

References