Jeff Ely Angel Henderson THERMOELECTRIC SOLAR POWER GENERATION FOR SPACE APPLICATIONS
INTRODUCTION Team members include Jeff Ely and Angel Henderson from the Old Dominion University MAE department, Iseley Marshall from the University of South Dakota in material science, Dr Jin Ho Kang research staff at the NIA in cooperation with NASA Langley. And the help of a few other NIA and NASA staff
PROBLEM + SOLUTION Problem definition Expensive maintenance High deployment costs Harsh environmental conditions High sustainability requirement Design Criteria Lightweight Flexible Cheap materials
WHY THERMOELECTRIC? Conventional photovoltaic's Heavy Fragile Expensive Sustainable Thermoelectric panels could be much better suited for space applications by improving each factor.
DESIGN CONCEPT Light- weight Flexible Cheap materials
SPRING AND SUMMER 2011
TESTING PHASE Effects of each coating were tested individually on conventional thermoelectric modules at 1 sun intensity (100mW/cm 2 ) Control – no coating Low emissivity top side High absorptivity top side High emissivity bottom side
TEST SETUP Photo of testing apparatus
TEST SETUP Thermocouple #1 Room temperature Thermocouple #2 3 inches above TE module Thermocouple #3 Top surface of TE module Thermocouple #4 Bottom surface of TE module Thermocouple $5 3 inches below TE module
Programs Figures: Real time data creates a graph with custom axes Data stored in database in real time 6300 readings for temperature, voltage, and current. LABVIEW FEATURES FOR PROJECT
Figure 1-10 The lab view software that record the experiment data in real time
SOLAR CELL TESTING
EXAMPLE DATA AT 0˚C
THE COMING WEEKS
GANTT CHART
MANUFACTURING PROCESS Obstacles to overcome Electrical grid slip Small size High precision requirement
MANUFACTURING PROCESS Use of Template Bismuth telluride (n-type) Selenium telluride (p-type)
QUESTIONS?
Flexible-Substrate Solar Arrays 20 SAFE MILSTAR Hubble UltraFlex on Mars Polar Lander Terra Olympus 1 (ESA) GE 20-kW Roll-Up Solar Array, circa 1973 ISS