High-Level Project Summary
The objective of this project was to address the interesting tasks presented in the Virtual Planetary Exploration V2.0 challenge. We reviewed the documentation and past successful examples other teams have presented and noticed that in all the past projects of planetary exploration tools, none have addressed a key aspect of any explorer and that is the generation and storage of energy. This is why our goal as a team was to present our deployable battery and introduce a plausible hand held tool which will aid those future explorers. This handheld planetary exploration tool consists of a battery base directly connected to a deployable solar panel released through a compliant mechanism.
Link to Project "Demo"
Link to Final Project
Detailed Project Description
The basic concept of our project is a handheld battery attached to a solar panel. We understand that current and future space exploration missions will value practicality and that solar panels are used commonly as a means of energy generation. Solar panels are usually a storing challenge as they take a significant surface area and many are used to power the vehicles and tools utilized in space. Our hand-held tool took inspiration in a common tool used right here on Earth, the umbrella. The umbrella inspired our design and presented a solution to store and deploy a portable solar panel. Another component we wanted to incorporate into the tool design was the release mechanism. It is commonplace for modern space machinery to utilize combustion-based release mechanisms which are one-time use and introduce a lot of unnecessary stress into machinery and ships. We took this opportunity to take a bi-stable compliant mechanism design and adapt it into our project as a release mechanism. Compliant mechanisms are those mechanisms that rely on their movement based on the flexibility of the material instead of traditional joints. This presents many meaningful advantages compared to traditional joints, as compliant mechanisms require no lubrication and less pieces to manufacture and build. This also presents a reduction in costs compared to combustion based release mechanisms. The end product is a portable and small hand-held battery that is connected directly into a solar panel. The release mechanism utilizes small ropes to preload the solar panel and are attached to a single point at the bottom of the tool. Once the compliant mechanism is used, the string is cut and the solar panel releases. The mechanism can be reset with a new string and reusable. This is desirable as a portable energy device since it will most likely be used several times. Furthermore, the documentation of previous tools used by astronauts all lack such a device and when explorers become more autonomous, self sustaining energy tools for each individual will become more important and life sustaining in emergency situations. This low polygon prototype was entirely developed using SolidWorks.
Space Agency Data
Our project was inspired by the public research article “Bi-stable Mechanisms for Space Applications”, published by PLOS One. This article was opened to public access in December 2016 and was authored by several research professors from various universities in the USA and Europe. This collaborative effort was supported by NASA and part of the work was done at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. This article discusses a couple of bi-stable mechanisms and explores their potential applications in space environments. The article focuses on a bi-stable design and some variations of this one design. Furthermore it proposes that a possible application for compliant mechanisms in space is in the use of release mechanisms for reasons previously stated in our project description. There were several possibilities for the incorporation of compliant mechanisms in our tool design such as a switch which is highly proposed in the article. However, we decided to utilize the more clear and explained example of a release mechanism as it offered a reusable solution for storing a solar panel. We would like to credit this article and the authors for their compliant mechanism design as the mathematics and calculations for the proper movement from the mechanism were challenging and complex for the duration of this competition. Given the challenge we believe the final result successfully adapts the mechanism into a plausible and useful tool for hypothetical future explorers to have on their array of tools.
Hackathon Journey
This challenge presented a wonderful learning experience and journey. The biggest takeaway here was the entire process of designing a useful and practical tool, from the brainstorming all the way to the execution. By far the biggest challenge was landing on a problem that no other tool in the modern astronaut instrument library solved. Our proposal lingers a lot on the future aspect of the challenge, although we believe that energy storage and generation is one of the biggest challenges we must address while conducting space exploration and planetary research.
References
Zirbel SA, Tolman KA, Trease BP, Howell LL (2016) Bistable Mechanisms for Space Applications. PLoS ONE 11(12): e0168218. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0168218
Tags
#CompliantMechanisms #SolarPanel #Tools
Global Judging
This project has been submitted for consideration during the Judging process.