On 20/07/2011 3:35 AM, Peter Fairbrother wrote:
Sylvia Else wrote:
On 19/07/2011 10:48 PM, Peter Fairbrother wrote:
Bohica Bohica wrote:
On Jul 12, 9:17 pm, Sylvia Else wrote:
The Australian Government has, for reasons that have much to do with
politics, and little to do with the environment, decided to throw
$Au 10
billion into the bottomless pit that is renewable energy.

Lest it all get turned into yet more solar panels and windfarms, I
invite all comers to submit their plans for orbital power
satellites. At
least then we might get some technological advance for our money, even
though I doubt we'd actually see any orbital power.

Sylvia.

You could make a **** load of parabolic reflectors aimed at the hot
part of a Stirling engine, these things are about 6m wide and produce
about 10Kw
A Spanish comp[any makes them. The main problem is the colour, all
shiny and not a bit og brown or green on them :-)

That's actually close to what the generating part of an orbital power
sat should be - lots of mirrors feeding sunlight to a Brayton cycle gas
turbine. Forget acres of solar cells, they are too heavy and too
expensive and too fragile.

A Brayton cycle engine in that size range is lighter than a Stirling
engine, no regenerator needed. Not as efficient, but cheaper and lighter
to launch.

Will it run maintenance free for a couple of decades?

The compressor and turbine, I don't see why not. It's only one moving
part, gas bearings are well-developed technology and there are no
critical rotating seals.

It's much simpler than a Stirling engine, and they reckon they can make
those work for long periods in space.

The generator? Yes, I'd think so too.

The heat exchangers might need some work though, probably multiple
redundant circuits. leak sealing and gas refills or something. Likewise
the mirrors and mirror pointing stuff.


But would it need to last 20 years without maintenance? If you are going
to build it in the first place, you'd need a good launch capability anyway.

And if it's providing a goodly proportion of your energy, you'd want to
be able to fix it if it breaks. no matter what the built-in reliability
claimed was.

I would assume that there would be enough examples in orbit to provide
redundancy in the case of failure. After all, even if you can perform
in-orbit maintenance, it's unlikely you can do so at the kind of short
notice required for power supply failures that cause blackouts.

If it lasts 20 years on average without intervention, then you can
probably afford to deorbit it when it breaks, and send up a new one. If
you're talking about in-orbit repairs you're almost certainly talking
about manned missions, with all that that entails. One thing the shuttle
missions have shown us is that getting up there is just the start.
Fixing things in zero-g while wearing a space suit is not such an easy task.

Sylvia.