Announcements for SAE Mobilus
Browse AllRecent SAE Edge™ Research Reports
Browse All 177Latest Journal Issues
Browse All 16Recent Books
Browse All 632Recently Published
Browse AllLong-term orbital missions require highly independent life-support systems, maintaining ecological stability under limited external support and subsystem attenuation. Conventional strategies are typically based on fixed threshold rules or deterministic mass-balance models and cannot adapt to disturbances or multi-objective trade-offs between resource safety and environmental load. This paper proposes a reinforcement learning framework for managing micro closed-loop ecological systems under reliability decay and environmental constraints. A reinforcement learning controller based on Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is trained to learn stable regulation policies with random disturbances. A dynamic state model is constructed to describe the coupled and time-sequential elements, ranging from water storage, oxygen concentration, energy reserve, subsystem reliability to ecological load. Degradation propagation is integrated into the transition dynamics through reliability-dependent recycling efficiency. Simulation experiments demonstrate that the proposed policy maintains all resource variables within the safety margins while reducing ecological imbalance compared with traditional strategies. Consequently, the proposed framework provides an expandable control architecture for independent regulation of space station life-support systems.
To investigate the effect of negative pressure environment on the aging behavior of solid propellants, a 60-day negative pressure accelerated aging test was carried out on SG-2 propellant with five working conditions: atmospheric pressure at room temperature, atmospheric pressure at 80°C, and negative pressure at 40°C/60°C/80°C. Combined with Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), the functional group evolution law and thermal decomposition kinetic characteristics of the periphery zone and core zone of the propellant were analyzed. The results show that the propellant exhibits significant inhomogeneous aging characteristics under negative pressure aging. The functional group structure in the periphery zone is more stable in the early aging stage; in the middle stage, components such as DNT and C2 in the core zone migrate to the periphery zone; in the late stage, the undegraded components in the core zone continuously supplement the periphery zone, making the functional group integrity of the periphery zone better than that of the core zone. DSC tests combined with Kissinger and Ozawa methods show that the thermal decomposition activation energy of the propellant decreases continuously with the increase of aging temperature under negative pressure environment, and the activation energy drops to 428.91 kJ/mol after aging at negative pressure 80°C. High temperature accelerates the volatilization of NG, the cross- linking of NC molecular chains and the consumption of stabilizer, leading to the easy breakage of O-NO₂ groups and the significant deterioration of thermal stability. This study clarifies that the aging mechanism of the propellant under negative pressure environment is the synergistic effect of component migration and diffusion, functional group decomposition and molecular chain cross-linking, which provides a theoretical basis for the storage and application of solid propellants in negative pressure service scenarios such as deep space exploration.














