Lighting up the Lunar Night with Fuel Cells
December 12, 2007
Regenerative fuel cell stacks at NASA Glenn. Credit: NASA
How do you survive in a remote, mountainous region that has no water or wind and sometimes goes without sunlight for weeks? This is not the premise for a survivalist reality show; it's a question NASA must answer before sending humans to live and work on the moon.
Within the next twenty years, people again will explore the vast lunar terrain. This time, we're going to build a permanent outpost where we will conduct scientific research, learn to live off the land, and test new technologies for future missions to Mars and beyond.
During the day, solar arrays will generate electricity for habitats, life support systems, rovers, communications systems and other equipment. But lunar nights last up to 334 hours in some places. Even at the moon's south pole, the sun never rises high. Mountains and hills block sunlight from reaching the surface, and night bathes the moon in total darkness for more than 100 hours.
NASA's Glenn Research Center in Cleveland is leading an effort to develop systems that could store energy for use during the long, frigid lunar nights. The solution may be a fuel cell system that originally was designed for a high-altitude solar-electric airplane.
In 2005, Electrical Engineer David Bents and his team at Glenn demonstrated the first and only fully closed-loop, regenerative fuel cell ever operated. Though the technology never was implemented on the airplane, Glenn engineers are gleaning valuable information from the project as they design a next-generation regenerative fuel cell for the moon.
How It Works:
A typical hydrogen fuel cell combines hydrogen from a tank and oxygen from the air to produce electricity, leaving water and heat as its only byproducts. A regenerative fuel cell also works in reverse, using electricity to divide the water into hydrogen and oxygen, which are fed back into the fuel cell to produce more electricity.
"What makes our regenerative fuel cell unique is that it's closed loop and completely sealed," Bents said. "Nothing goes in and nothing comes out, other than electrical power and waste heat. The hydrogen, oxygen and product water inside are simply recycled over and over again."
In other words, instead of using oxygen from the air like other regenerative fuel cells, the closed-loop system re-uses the oxygen extracted from the water. That makes it ideal for use on the moon, where there is no oxygen.
"On the moon, you would start with a tank of water. You'd use the solar arrays to make hydrogen and oxygen during the day, then use the hydrogen and oxygen to make electricity during the night when there's no sun," said Bents. "Ideally, if nothing broke and nothing wore out, it could run forever without being refueled."
The system is very similar to a rechargeable battery, but it can store four to six times more energy than a battery of the same weight.
An Energy Storage Milestone
In the summer of 2005, Glenn demonstrated the first fully closed-loop regenerative fuel cell ever operated. It completed five continuous day and night cycles. That's nowhere near forever, but at the end of the demonstration, it had not leaked and was capable of running at least one more cycle.
Those five days of operation were the result of several years of hard work. The team's diligence paid off by proving a regenerative fuel cell's potential as an energy storage device for aerospace solar power systems.
Since the demonstration in 2005, the team has modified and upgraded much of the software, circuitry and hardware to make the system run more reliably.
The lessons they learned and information they gathered in the process will be invaluable to Glenn's Energy Storage Project Office when it develops a prototype system to work in the harsh lunar environment.
"Even though it was originally designed for an airplane, the system has given us a leg up," said Ann Over, chief of Glenn's Advanced Capabilities Project Office. "The knowledge we gained will feed directly into our lunar regenerative fuel cell technology program."
Glenn plans to begin work in 2008 on a prototype regenerative fuel cell system for the lunar outpost.
Source: Jan Wittry (SGT, Inc.), NASA's Glenn Research Center
-
5 Questions: Rando on resetting the 'aging clock,' cell by cell
Jan 23, 2012 |
4.7 / 5 (3) |
0
-
Researchers develop CAD-Type tools for engineering RNA control systems
Dec 22, 2011 |
5 / 5 (4) |
0
-
Study finds iPS cells match embryonic stem cells in modeling human disease
Dec 13, 2011 |
not rated yet |
0
-
New 'Achilles' heel' in breast cancer: tumor cell mitochondria
Dec 01, 2011 |
not rated yet |
0
-
Researchers uncover mechanism that regulates human pluripotent stem cell metabolism
Nov 15, 2011 |
not rated yet |
0
-
Engineers build first sub-10-nm carbon nanotube transistor
Feb 01, 2012 |
4.9 / 5 (31) |
30
-
Something old, something new: Evolution and the structural divergence of duplicate genes
Jan 31, 2012 |
4.6 / 5 (7) |
1
-
The hidden nanoworld of ice crystals: Revealing the dynamic behavior of quasi-liquid layers
Jan 30, 2012 |
5 / 5 (3) |
1
-
Stock market network reveals investor clustering
Jan 27, 2012 |
3.9 / 5 (23) |
8
-
Of microchemistry and molecules: Electronic microfluidic device synthesizes biocompatible probes
Jan 26, 2012 |
5 / 5 (1) |
0
-
Need help reading 3-D
17 hours ago
-
A way to send and receive wireless data
23 hours ago
-
Calling function with no input argument
Feb 10, 2012
-
Force free body diagram problem on gym equipment
Feb 10, 2012
-
Empirical data regarding shower heads and water
Feb 10, 2012
-
feed hold button on CNC lathe
Feb 09, 2012
- More from Physics Forums - General Engineering
More news stories
Google might launch Drive for cloud storage soon
(PhysOrg.com) -- Google's next big move, according to the Wall Street Journal, is a cloud storage service called Drive. Hardly first to the plate, Google is simply catching up to introducing its cloud reposi ...
Love a click away in Indonesia's Twitter Republic
He was a geeky kid from Yogyakarta, she a glamorous city girl in Jakarta. In a country with one of the world's most vibrant social networking scenes they fell in love on Twitter.
7 hours ago |
4 / 5 (1) |
0
Europeans protest controversial Internet pact
Tens of thousands of people marched in protests in more than a dozen European cities Saturday against a controversial anti-online piracy pact that critics say could curtail Internet freedom.
22 hours ago |
4.6 / 5 (9) |
1
Walney offshore wind farm is world's biggest (for now)
(PhysOrg.com) -- The Walney wind farm on the Irish Sea--characterized by high tides, waves and windy weather--officially opened this week. The farm is treated in the press as a very big deal as the Walney ...
Navy to begin tests on electromagnetic railgun prototype launcher
The Office of Naval Research (ONR)'s Electromagnetic (EM) Railgun program will take an important step forward in the coming weeks when the first industry railgun prototype launcher is tested at a facility ...
Feb 06, 2012 |
4.7 / 5 (16) |
93
|
Injured boomers beware: Know when to see doctor
(AP) -- It happened to nurse Jane Byron years after an in-line skating fall, business owner Haralee Weintraub while doing "men's" push-ups, and avid cyclist Gene Wilberg while lifting a heavy box.
Latin America mining boom clashes with conservation
Latin America is experiencing a mining boom as prices rise fuelled by a hike in global demand, but the region is also being hit by a wave of violent protests, strikes and rallies by environmentalists.
Explained: Sigma
It's a question that arises with virtually every major new finding in science or medicine: What makes a result reliable enough to be taken seriously? The answer has to do with statistical significance -- but ...
Political leaders play key role in how worried Americans are by climate change: study
More than extreme weather events and the work of scientists, it is national political leaders who influence how much Americans worry about the threat of climate change, new research finds.
NASA budget will axe Mars deal with Europe: scientists
US President Barack Obama's budget proposal to be submitted next week for 2013 will cut NASA's budget by 20 percent and eliminate a major partnership with Europe on Mars exploration, scientists said Thursday.
New power source discovered
(PhysOrg.com) -- Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and RMIT University have made a breakthrough in energy storage and power generation.
Dec 12, 2007
Rank: not rated yet
If I were NASA (or indeed a solar or wind power company) this is the basket I'd be dumping most of my eggs into. Except I'd have done it 25 years ago instead of just starting now. They are pathetically short sighted. It's really depressing.