High-Level Project Summary
Our conceptual design for a power system that operates efficiently under Venus's ambient conditionsOur system generates power through producing piezoelectricity. The generator makes use of the abundant wind energy on the planet's surface to produce electricity. This means electricity can be generated during the day and night alike since the wind is always available. The stability of piezo electricity in extreme conditions also eliminates the constant struggle to eliminate heat and the very high pressure from our power system.
Link to Final Project
Link to Project "Demo"
Detailed Project Description
What exactly does it do?
We developed a power-generating system that utilizes crystals with anisotropic structures to generate piezoelectricity.
The system uses the wind on Venus to provide the stress required to polarize the crystalline piezoelectric materials, thus setting up a potential difference across the terminals of the crystals.
How does it work?
SPECIFICATIONS AND FEATURES
• piezocell
ATOMIC LEVEL INTERACTIONS
Figure a: Stressed piezoelectric material
Figure b: Neutral, relaxed piezoelectric material
Reference: From Appendix A, Fundamentals of Piezoelectricity
THE GENERATOR
The generator consists of an outer rigid cylindrical casing that has a perforated bottom as shown above.
Next is a layer of our piezo cells, all enclosed in a perforated cylindrical wall (to ensure that pressure inside the perforated cylindrical wall balances the one outside), with a piston that sandwiches the piezo cells.
The piezo cells are firmly attached to the piston, such that if the piston moves, they are either compressed or strained.
The piston consists of a spring with a relatively high stiffness factor.
The spring is attached to the frame at positions 1 and 2, as shown in the diagram.
The frames are attached to an axle, with a wind sail on the far end of the axle.
The frames are in such a way that they only rotate up to 180 degrees from positive x direction to negative x direction or from negative x direction to positive x direction.
DESIGN
It is designed in such a way that the maximum compression of the piezoelectric material happens when the frame is in the vertical position, ensuring that at 180 degrees, the pull on the piezoelectric material does not break the material.
WORKING
Initially, the spring is in a relaxed position, with the frame making an angle to the horizontal.
When the wind blows, the sail rotates in the direction of the wind, causing the spring to either push or pull on the piston, which in turn either compresses or pulls on the piezo cells, leading to the setting up of a potential difference across the terminals.
When the wind stops blowing, the springs bring the frame, which in turn is connected to the sail, back to the relaxed position.
Given the fact that Venus is a windy planet, there is a high probability of the cell generating power continuously for the collection of data.
It's benefits
•It utilizes a renewable energy source, which is wind.
•Plus, the piezoelectric material in the piezo cells will keep generating power given the fact that wind is available.
•It does not require a pressure vessel.
• It suffers very minimal damage from heat as the materials are heat resistant and also have a thermal protective coating on them.
What We Hope to Achieve
• We hope to achieve a cheap and efficient power renewable generating source rather than a power storage system.
Tools used
- Github for keeping the code for our project website.
- Netlify for hosting our website.
- Quilbot for checking the grammar of our submissions
- Microsoft Word for drafting our work
- Google for making research
Space Agency Data
We heavily relied on data to design a system that would work considering venus' hostile environment.
Learning About Venus
- Venus | NASA
- VERITAS: Exploring the Deep Truths of Venus (nasa.gov)
- Overview | Venus – NASA Solar System Exploration
Learning About Power Systems
Hackathon Journey
Through participating in the Space Apps Challenge, we have been able to explore our creativity in critical thinking and idea generation. We learned to pick concepts from each other's ideas and put them together to develop a feasible project.
The choice of this challenge was based on our curiosity for space exploration and the interest in using science and technology to drive toward finding answers to our unsolved questions about outer space.
We first tasked each member with brainstorming possible concepts that we could use. With these, we checked the feasibility of each of the ideas and finally put ideas from different members' thoughts together to make our final project.
The major challenge we faced was the limited time to attend to the project, as we are in a rigorous period of our school year in which the courseload is quite overwhelming. We were able to manage this by dividing tasks and making the best use of the times we met to discuss our findings.
We would like to extend our sincere appreciation to the organizers of the Space Apps program and to the space agencies that freely provided us with the data we needed to understand and come up with a working solution.
References
- https://www.eeweb.com/wp-content/uploads/articles-app-notes-files-power-conversion-efficiency-measurement-methods.pdf
- Piezoelectricity - Wikipedia
- Electrical Energy Harvesting From Mechanical Pressure of Vehicles Using Piezoelectric Generators By Ashish Dakhole, Amol Boke
Tags
#space exploration, #venus, #solar system, #hardware