V1 Rover

Querétaro | Exploring Venus Together

Power Generation System for Venus Rover

High-Level Project Summary

We developed two power generation systems for the rover's battery. One is the thermoelectric cell that uses the atmospheric temperature and the second are bladeless wind turbines.

Link to Final Project

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1spE8SdjrOk3fUkqHmU-Mroxi5zOwyejEueKaWsk-3gw/edit?usp=sharing

Link to Project "Demo"

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/16bqFSd6dQsKUvOrQzw3qkvq6vArp_4D3G__ARDRRJJo/edit?usp=sharing

Detailed Project Description

We chose to take advantage of the energy present in the atmosphere, so the proposed system generates electricity without using fuel or radioactive isotopes.


Thermoelectric cell

It consists of a two-staged system that uses the temperature and the wind. Firstly, we designed a thermoelectric cell that receives heat from the atmosphere and transforms it into voltage. The cell has a grid of semiconductors (Bi2Te3) with two different Seebeck coefficients, gold connectors and insulating materials. It has the special characteristic that it is completely insulated from the outside except for a small piece of gold that can be disconnected from the rest of the cell, allowing it to cool down when the battery is fully charged. An active refrigeration device based on a compressor, an expansion valve and a cooling fluid helps to take away unnecessary heat from the cell and it is powered by a secondary power source.


Figure 1. Thermoelectric cell


Bladeless turbines

Two bladeless wind turbines was added to fulfil his extra energy demand. Two masts rise from the back of the rover or lander. Even though winds on the surface of Venus do not reach high velocities (>1m/s), the thick atmosphere will make them vibrate and a piezoelectric generator will be in charge of converting this vibration into electrical current. The power generated by the turbines will be sent to the battery and to the compressor.


We hope, in spite the materials or systems are just a theoretical and without the owing tests, that with this electric system the battery energy lasts at least for sixty days, acquiring information and new data from the planet, giving new possibilities for other missions.


We used SolidWorks for the 3D model and animation of the thermoelectric cell, and the "Desmos" platform for the graphing and solving formulas.

Space Agency Data

Work Performed under the Planetary Science Program Support Task. (2017). Energy Storage Technologies for Future Planetary Science Missions. JPL D-101146


We used it for research of a battery for the rover and what would be the best for our project and the energy that we had to reach for the thermoelectric and bladeless turbine requirements of energy.

Hackathon Journey

Overall, we agree as a team that Space Apps was a great experience! We definitely found challenges along the way that we didn't expect, but we learned a lot and had fun.

We chose the Venus challenge because we were all interested in designing power sources, rather than software. We also thought that this was the challenge in which we could have more knowledge about. We soon found that we were wrong. There was a lot of information online and a lot of topics we didn't know about, so we felt a little overwelmed at some point. However, we managed to identify just those sources that actually contributed to our research, we got guidance from our mentor, and remembered our objective before losing track. The event was very well organized and we are truly grateful to those who contributed to our local Space Apps Challenge.

References

Soberanes, G. (2017). Determinación del coeficiente de Seebeck en una celda Peltier comercial.




  • Bergam, T. et. al. (2011). Fundamentals of Heat and Mass Transfer (7th Edition). John Wiley & Sons.

Tags

#thermoelectric #powersource #Venus

Exploring Venus Together

Your challenge is to design an energy storage system that will power a surface lander or rover on the surface of Venus for at least 60 days, so that there is a viable energy storage capability for long-duration exploration missions.