Designing a base on Mars is every aspiring astronaut’s dream, but for a select group of students, it’s just another homework assignment.
This challenge confronted a team of students who competed in the NASA sponsored Revolutionary Aerospace Systems Concepts Academic Linkage contest in June. The interdisciplinary team comprised three students from textiles engineering and four from aerospace engineering.
“The actual concept was to design a full mission plan to Mars with innovative parts,” Joseph Carter, senior in textiles and team member, said.
The first part of their design was an inflatable habitat structure, built with multiple layers of different textile materials.
“Rockets, which take people to Mars, are tall and thin, whereas we would like living quarters to be short and flat,’ Warren Jasper, professor of Textiles Engineering, said. Jasper served as one of the faculty sponsors for the team. “Thus, we designed the habitat to be inflatable. The inner shell was designed to be cylindrical, and the outer to be oblique, like part of a sphere, so that any meteorites hitting it would bounce off.”
The habitat’s construction material consisted of textiles such as Demron , which served as a radiation shield, and Vectran , included for strength.
“A previous team guided by Dr. Jasper has designed a blanket type structure for a habitat, but we wanted to do away with the solid structure and build something flexible,” Carter said. “We expanded on the original idea we had, which was to build a tent like structure about eight inches thick.”
The team started out with a literature review and an extensive preliminary design review, followed by some simulations.
“We tried doing some of our own simulations for the inflated dome of the habitat based on finite element analysis,” Carter said. “We also tested the strength of materials to see how much they would degrade with radiation exposure, for which we tested Vectran by exposing it to radiations in the Pulstar Nuclear Reactor at N.C . State.”
Part of the contest was to incorporate the materials already present on Mars into their survival tools.
“The students also planned on piling ‘Regeleth ,’ which is the official name for Mars dirt, on top of the structure to provide additional protection from radiation,” Jasper said.
The second part of their design was a reactor that would turn the carbon dioxide present on Mars into water by catalysis with hydrogen.
“The idea was that hydrogen could be got along from earth initially and used to catalyze carbon dioxide,” Andre Mazzoleni , associate professor of mechanical engineering and co-adviser, said. “The products of the chemical reaction would be methane, which could be used as a fuel and water. The water could be used for drinking there, and the remaining could be broken down into hydrogen and oxygen. The oxygen could be used for breathing, and the Hydrogen could be fed back again into the reaction to continue the catalysis.”
The Sabatier Reactor is based on the concept that Mars has carbon dioxide as the main component of its atmosphere. It uses nickel as catalyst, and the most attractive feature of the team’s design was that it enabled a large area to volume reaction, which would speed up the reaction by a large degree.
“Instead of using heavy nickel pellets as catalyst, we impregnated quartz fiber with nickel nano-particles ,” Carter said.
NASA was quite interested in the Sabatier reactor, and they continued correspondence regarding the development.
The team also presented its designs at the AIAA conference in April at Alabama, and won the second prize there.
According to Carter, working on the project was a good interdisciplinary experience, and it opened a lot of opportunities for all the students in the team.
