Awards & Nominations
Water Bears has received the following awards and nominations. Way to go!
Global Nominee
BeenUs for Venus
High-Level Project Summary
After the day we first looked up at the sky, we have found more questions than answers about our origins. Since then we have not stopped using our available technologies and our greatest desire to discover ourselves more and more.However, there are regions of the vast universe, such as the planet Venus, whose atmospheric conditions of pressure and temperature are totally destructive for known exploration systems.We designed a redundant system for the generation and storage of electrical energy that extends the duration of space missions in extreme conditions, making them useful for more than 60 days, which is enough time to carry out many exploration tasks on the planet's surface.
Link to Final Project
Link to Project "Demo"
Detailed Project Description
What exactly does it do?
The design is a redundant system that generates and stores energy for supporting a rover or surface lander on the surface of Venus for at least 60 days.
The system includes redundant power sources that power the rover or surface lander components required for the mission.
A redundant power sources includes a wind turbine for the rover or surface lander locomotion.
The redundant power source further includes a spring array for storing energy in a mechanical way.
Another redundant power source further includes a solar panel as parallel energy source and for running the instruments to collect data.
Another redundant power source further includes a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) as a parallel energy source and for running the rower or surface lander tools.
The Spring is able to store energy and to provide energy at the same time.
The system includes a battery array for energy storage.
How does it work?
The concept of redundant power is to mitigate the effects of varying conditions and power sources failure. Venus’s nights are over 50 Earth days long, which means that solar panels will not work during this time. Average wind speed is 0.6 m/s and there can also be the situation that wind speeds approach zero. There can be terrain, and weather factors that could render the rover or surface lander useless due to these conditions. If there is a power source failure, and it depends on a single power source, the rover or surface lander would also fail. Therefore, having several independent power sources increase the possibility of a greater life time.
Wind turbine
A Savonious wind turbine is selected as a main power source for locomotion. There exist deployable wind turbines, but are too big and heavy. Even though Savonious power generation is less, it is a less complex deployment, and produces high torque relative to other turbines. The Savonious wind turbine can produce approximately 3W for average wind speeds of 0.6m/s.
An approach to save energy is to directly use produced energy to avoid the losses from the cables and battery efficiency.
This is the energy required for different operations during the mission.
Solar panel
The solar panel selected is a graphene solar panel designed to withstand temperatures higher than 500°C. The solar panel is used as a parallel energy source to recharge the batteries and to power several low power components such as the navigation system.
Stored spring array
By winding a spring, energy can be stored for latter use. By having an array of springs, more energy can be stored. The wind turbine is used to wind up the spring to store mechanical energy for latter us and not only depend on battery storage, also adding to the redundancy. Even further, The spring will be able to provide energy for components that need energy at the moment and at the same time store energy. This is done by a configuration where the wind turbine is connected to the hub of the spring, and the output shaft outside the spring.
The differential adder is used to measure the amount of energy that it is stored.
Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator (RTG)
The RTG is used as another parallel energy storage. It is used alternatively for running tools. It is further used to power the cooling system that gives an
additional redundancy level to already high temperature electronics.
Controller and power
The controller is used to monitor the power sources and to also read information from the sources. Internally the controller includes a power module that adapts the signal voltages for the system. The controller also has other data processing operations. In case the controller starts to fail, a bypass system is used to send energy directly (through the power module) to components and reduce to the most basic operations, and this way extending the rover or surface lander lifetime.
Battery
The types of battery for energy storage that have been found that can currently withstand the conditions of Venus and at the same time take advantage of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in their favor are the following:
High Temp All Solid State Battery: LiAl-CO2 (or redesigned to Na/K-CO2)
Battery with a very low level of self-discharge in this type of environment: LiCOS2
Other types of batteries to consider: Na2S5 and Na/NiCl2
On the other hand, the best electrolyte for this type of storage in harsh environments would be Molten Carbonate Chloride Salt.
What benefits does it have?
From Venera 7 in 1970 (the first spacecraft to make a soft landing on Venus), until today the data we have about it are few, since the missions have not managed to survive for long. Being able to guarantee that a mission to Venus lasts for several days will allow us to study and understand a planet that in the past is believed to be similar to Earth. It would be incredible to know what led Venus to be different from Earth.
What do you hope to achieve?
We hope that our project will be that complement that allows a rover or lander to survive long enough to carry out scientific experiments, collect data and samples from this wonderful planet. We know that it will be a great step in the exploration and understanding of our solar neighborhood.
What tools, coding languages hardware, or software did you use to develop your project?
We have been guided by the latest advances in batteries that have been made that withstand environments as hostile as that of Venus. Power generation sources that are used in similar missions.
Space Agency Data
We consider that the most relevant data for our design was extracted from NASA documents, such as the article called: "Automaton Rover for Extreme Environments" from 2016.
This article contains very important chapters that explain in detail about energy collection and storage systems in hostile environments, as well as other topics such as the control system, communications, and other types of instrumentation necessary for this type of mission. .
We were able to find much of the details of the multiple power sources we propose in our redundant power generation and storage design.
Hackathon Journey
It was an incredible experience, in which our individual and team skills were put into test for finding the solution of our challenge. From this experience, we also learned about hidden skills that our group members had, skills that allowed us to make a correct distribution and delegation of the workload, in order to reach the stage of a formal proposal to be reviewed by the jury. We were under a lot of pressure, but at the same time we always managed to find motivation by seeing the efforts of the other teams, who were constantly producing ideas just like us. We appreciate all the efforts of the members of our team, as well as the Staff of the Pierre and Marie Curie School, whose logistics were up to the magnitude of this beautiful event. They made us feel comfortable, confident and supported by professionals.
References
Tags
#hardware #Venus #design #storagesystem #storagedevice #waterbears #spaceexploration