High-Level Project Summary
On our way to solving this problem, we have designed a series of necessary supplies to improve the preconstructed habitat by adding essential, elementary tools, furniture, and other items. In this sense, we developed an approach that optimizes the time of printing, the material required, and the space and versatility of each of the pieces printed with the “3M design”, which means multifunctional, minimalist, and modular design.In addition, everything was designed so that its usefulness extends to any scenario that requires resource optimization and habitat adaptation (i.e.: they are applicable not only outside but also inside the earth).
Link to Final Project
Link to Project "Demo"
Detailed Project Description
Our project solves the elementary problem of carrying basic things from earth to space based on 3D printing items like furniture and tools, e.g., a screwdriver, a spoon, table, chair, etc.
Another goal in this project was to recreate an innovative design of a rover mars wheel. In order to complete this we have used solidworks CAD software.
The benefits of our design are what we called "the 3 M's" design.
- Modularity: it means that if something breaks, it will only be necessary to replace the broken part and not the whole device
- Multifunctionality: Each of the instruments is made in such a way that it can have multiple ways of being used, this to make the most of the resources.
- Minimalist design: A minimal design (and that uses optimized geometries and adapted to printing limitations) reduces printing time and materials, as well as increases the useful life of the instruments by having a simpler operation.
Considering that we already have solved details such as air, water, food and energy; our focus areas were:
- Repair and maintenance: tools to keep any other element or device in the habitat in good condition
- Hygiene: dry toilet (which uses the Martian regolith to take advantage of the planet's resources), rake, cutlery and cutlery.
- Physical health: to avoid problems such as the loss of muscle mass due to microgravity, elements are added to exercise, as well as venoclysis equipment.
- Mental health: playful elements such as a chessboard.
Space Agency Data
In fact, we used a small amount of data but there were a lot of other qualitative resources such as guidelines, recommendations for similar missions and other additive infrastructure design. For instance:
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20200001427/downloads/20200001427.pdf
https://www.nasa.gov/chapea/habitat
https://ttu-ir.tdl.org/handle/2346/87095
Hackathon Journey
It was definitely a wonderful experience from the first minute. All of us experienced a new challenge which has been truly useful for our learning and formation as engineers. Despite the hard work and tiredness, we’ve had the time of our scientific/academic life, we improved our communication and collaboration skills with a common purpose.
The local university UNAQ has been too kind when supplying us with food, coffee and snacks. We are really thankful for that.
References
- Meteorology on Mars: https://donnees-data.asc-csa.gc.ca/dataset/0e338f52-25e4-465c-8104-bb9d7c8d3df3
- Design guidelines: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20200001427/downloads/20200001427.pdf
- Some printing models used as a starting point: https://nasa3d.arc.nasa.gov/models
- Additive construction: https://ttu-ir.tdl.org/handle/2346/87095
Tags
#Mars #AdditiveManufacturing #solidworks #3Ddesign #stl #3Dprinting