Multidisciplinary Preliminary Sizing of Advanced Life Support Systems for Space

This paper describes a multidisciplinary strategy for designing and preliminary sizing of advanced life support systems for space applications, ranging from open-loop solutions to more advanced physico-chemical and bioregenerative systems. The strategy, based on the use of transient simulation, heuristic techniques, and realtime integrated control has been implemented into a Matlab-Simulink tool, letting large numbers of system configurations to be rapidly tested and evaluated. The tool has been built aiming to easy expandability and updating. The optimization approach for selection of design solutions is based on a MOPSO (Multi Objective Particle Swarm Optimization) algorithm, which presented optimum convergence properties. Different test cases have been considered, both to evaluate tool's capacity to select proper life support system configurations, and to verify sizing accuracy.

Once validated, the strategy has been tested on CAB (Bioregenerative Environmental Control), a project of the Italian Space Agency and Thales Alenia Space Italia for the development of a closed-loop bioregenerative system.