In order to maintain the lighting of NASA's Artemis human lunar outpost, Sandia National Laboratory is developing a micro grid to handle the power distribution from the micro nuclear reactor at the lunar base to various living and support facilities NASA's ambitious desire to establish a permanent human presence on the moon as a preview of the final manned mission to Mars poses a huge engineering challenge.
The lunar base will not only be a thousand times farther from the earth than the space laboratory, but also need a new way to solve the problem.
One of the biggest challenges will be to provide electricity to outposts. Because the base is expected to live for two months at a time, it must operate in 14 days of moonlight. This means that solar panels are not a practical option, so a series of small nuclear reactors are being developed to use with or replace them.
However, it is not just a matter of providing voltage. The base will need a small power grid to transmit electricity and ensure regular and stable supply. As an additional complication, the base will consist of two facilities: a habitat and a mining and fuel processing complex located miles away.
The proposed microgrid, one for each facility and interconnected, will be similar to the power supply for the international space station, but will require some basic changes. For example, it still needs to decide whether the grid operates on DC or AC, and then convert to DC in the habitat.
Other problems include developing systems and software to regulate the power of the processing plant so that the voltage level can be balanced from a few milliseconds to the change of demand throughout the season. To this end, Sandia developed a scalable microgrid facility and control system design method to study the energy requirements and specifications of the lunar base.
The idea is to produce a top-down design, first develop the control system and energy storage specifications, and then develop the components that meet these specifications. In addition, microgrids will require excessive engineering to improve flexibility, but at the same time they will be flexible enough to enable one grid to cooperate with another.
Sandia Electrical Engineer Jack Flickr said: "There are some very important differences between microgrids like the international space station and those with a lunar base range. One of the differences is geographical size, which can be a problem, especially when operating at low DC voltage. The other is that when you start expanding these systems, there will be more power electronics and more distributed energy throughout the base. Sandia research has a lot of distributed energy The microgrid of source resources has been for quite a long time. "