ISBN 9783843932943

978-3-8439-3294-3, Reihe Raumfahrt

Claas Olthoff
Dynamic Simulation of Extravehicular Activities

325 Seiten, Dissertation Technische Universität München (2017), Softcover, A5

Zusammenfassung / Abstract

Spacesuits will be an integral part of human space exploration missions. These one-person spacecraft are highly complex engineering products that require a great deal of analysis and design before being qualified for operational use. Due to long communication delays and without the option to quickly return to Earth in case of an emergency, the requirements for reliability and stability of future life support systems for deep space missions will be even more stringent than for missions to low Earth orbit.

The experience gained during past and present spacesuit projects suggests that it may be beneficial to provide engineers with a tool that can perform dynamic and holistic simulations of extravehicular activities across multiple technical and scientific domains and on multiple levels of detail. Holistic in this context refers to the model including not just the spacesuit, but also the human occupant and the environment in which the suit operates. To assess the benefits of such a system, the Virtual Spacesuit (V-SUIT) simulation tool has been developed. V-SUIT depicts a wide range of domains and their inter-actions, from thermodynamics to human respiration, from radiative heat exchange to chemical adsorption.

V-SUIT is a combination of two software tools developed at the Technical University of Munich (TUM): the Virtual Habitat (V-HAB) and the Thermal Moon Simulator (TherMoS). V-HAB is a dynamic life support system simulation with a focus on space habitats used in long duration missions. TherMoS enables the dynamic calculation of radiative heat exchange between moving objects on the lunar surface and their surrounding environment. V-SUIT combines V-HAB and TherMoS with some additional simulation components to enable dynamic and holistic simulations of extravehicular activities.

Results from three case studies are presented: A firefighter wearing a protective garment in close proximity to a fire, a prototype of a newly developed PLSS, and a recreation of one of the EVAs performed during the Apollo 15 mission. While the firefighter is a proof-of-concept designed to demonstrate terrestrial applications of V-SUIT, the latter two case studies represent different use cases for V-SUIT: During the development process of a spacesuit and as a support tool during operations.

Both simulation results show good agreement with test and flight data, respectively, validating the modeling approach in general and specifically the interfaces between the domains.