Power Management for Space Advanced Life Support

2002-01-2527

07/15/2002

Event
International Conference On Environmental Systems
Authors Abstract
Content
Space power systems include power source, storage, and management subsystems. In current crewed spacecraft designs, solar cells are the power source, batteries provide storage, and the crew performs any required load scheduling. For future crewed planetary surface systems using Advanced Life Support, we assume that plants will be grown to produce much of the crew's food and that nuclear power will be employed. Battery storage is much more costly than nuclear power capacity and so is not likely to be provided. We investigate scheduling of power demands to reduce the required peak power generating capacity. The peak to average power ratio is a good measure of power capacity efficiency. We can easily schedule power demands to reduce the peak power below the potential maximum, but simple scheduling rules may not achieve the lowest possible peak to average power ratio. An initial power scheduling example is simple enough for a human to solve, but a more complex example with many intermittent load demands required automatic scheduling. Excess power is a free resource and should be used to gain any possible benefits.
Meta TagsDetails
DOI
https://doi.org/10.4271/2002-01-2527
Pages
10
Citation
Jones, H., "Power Management for Space Advanced Life Support," SAE Technical Paper 2002-01-2527, 2002, https://doi.org/10.4271/2002-01-2527.
Additional Details
Publisher
Published
Jul 15, 2002
Product Code
2002-01-2527
Content Type
Technical Paper
Language
English