Recycling Waste Heat into Electricity for Spacecraft Systems

Heat created by electronics onboard the International Space Station (ISS) now gets thrown overboard into the void. But new technology developed by Rice University engineering students to turn heat into power would make it possible to put it back to work to run the various systems onboard. The students are using thermoelectric generators that transfer heat from cooling pipes like those used to radiate it into space. The generators serve several functions - they could perform their primary task of generating electricity while cooling the station and its components, or they could reverse the process and actually send hot coolant at the desired temperature back into the station. The prototype's generators are efficient enough now to power its onboard pumps, but the hope is the conversion rate from state-of-the-art generators - about 15 percent - would be enough to send excess electricity back to a spacecraft for other uses as well, according to the team.

Transcript

00:00:03 our team is called team space ring we are set out to develop a multifunctional heat exchanging system for future space habitat so right now on the International Space Station and all like electronics need a separate cooling system to keep them at their functional temperature and all the heat found the electronics are radiated into deeper space and are completely wasted on the

00:00:29 other hand the space station spent a very big budget on power generation from solar panels so we were motivated to develop a system that can capture the way street pee and then extract power out of it to supplement the power usage on this space station or any space habitat that we might have in the future in our design like hot water comes through the inner pipe in here and the

00:00:53 outer pipe outer casing like holds the cold water and inside our thermoelectric generators and so they make use of the temperature difference between the hot fluid and the cold fluid and they generate power and so over here we have like our electronics box and this the power is out put it into the electronic box and we can also input power from the electronics and that would cause the

00:01:15 thermoelectric generators to have a cooling function instead and so that would allow us to cool the system if we need to it's just a heat engine it's like any heat engine you have you have a power source inter most in terms of heat just like your car and you convert it into some other form of energy and in our case its electricity