Professor Beik will be speaking about Space Power Systems: DC Microgrid for Sustainable Power Generation on Moon and Mars!

All students, staff, and faculty are welcome to come to this seminar. Free food will be provided!

The abstract for this talk will be below:
Humans seem to be more determined than ever not to only explore other planets but to start building infrastructure with the current focus on Moon, where we can build, test and operate critical infrastructure and then uses this as a testbed for developing infrastructure for Mars. One of the first things to setup is an electrical power grid. This talk discusses a DC microgrid for sustainable power generation on the Moon and Mars for a human inhabitation base. The microgrid will have different sources for Moon and Mars as they have different environments, e.g. the Moon doesn't have a significant atmosphere like Earth, hence wind power generation will not be a feasible solution. The microgrid for Mars includes the followings, while the Moon microgrid will have a similar structure without wind generation: A wind turbine system with a dual rotor generator whose output is rectified using an AC-DC passive rectification state and connected to the microgrid common DC bus with a fixed voltage using a DC-DC converter. Solar panels that use passive emitter and rear cell material suitable for in-space application; the solar panels are connected to the DC bus using a DC-DC converter. Battery energy storage system that uses a modified lithium-ion material that is space-tested and connects to the DC bus via a bidirectional DC-DC converter.