INTERIOR ENVIRONMENT MODELING FOR RESILIENT EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL HABITATS

There are several challenges that occur when creating extraterrestrial structures that are not relevant to terrestrial applications. The Resilient Extra-Terrestrial Habitat Institute is a NASA funded research project focused on developing resilient lunar habitats. In order to develop these deep-space structures, many considerations have to be made to account for scenarios that are not relevant to Earth. Such scenarios include meteorite impacts, moonquakes, radiation, and moon dust accumulation. To observe possible consequences of these disruptions, RETHi established a modular coupled virtual testbed to monitor the effects of different deep-space related situations. MCVT is a computer model of a lunar habitat that uses a system-of-systems approach to examine the impacts of these scenarios. Currently, MCVT is developing methods to confront these extraterrestrial situations by utilizing robotic agents and expanding upon a variety of safety responses to increase resiliency.  RETHi also utilizes a cyber physical testbed to run cyber-physical experiments to validate the approaches used in MCVT. 

One of the numerous models in MCVT is the Habitat Interior Environment Model. HIEM monitors the interior environment of the lunar structure using physics-based calculations and inputs from its surroundings. There are three main disturbances that directly affect the interior environment—fire within the dome, meteorite impacts, and airlock failure. Such scenarios either increase or decrease the temperature and pressure. This data is then forwarded to other subsystems for further evaluation. HIEM can be remodeled to fit the pressure box in the cyber physical testbed. By doing so, it is then possible to validate the pressure leakage calculations used in HIEM using experimental data. HIEM is specifically designed to the lunar habitat currently in development; however, the model can be refitted to a variety of applications such as terrestrial, aerospace, space, and marine.