Technology selection and architecture optimization of in-situ resource utilization systems

This paper discusses an approach to exploring the conceptual design space of large-scale, complex electromechanical systems that are technologically immature. A modeling framework that addresses the fluctuating architectural landscape (an inherent feature of developing technology systems) is applied to the design of a lunar in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) oxygen plant. Four optimization methods using genetic algorithms are compared on both a quadratic-based test function and the ISRU plant design with the goal of balancing the resources spent on exploiting individual architectures and exploring a broad selection of architectures. These include two dual-level approaches that address the discrete architecture design space differently from the continuous sizing design space and two combinatorial approaches that address both the discrete and continuous simultaneously. It was found that the single-level, combinatorial approaches worked better on the real-world ISRU case study, providing a balance between computation time spent on optimizing sizing and performance of each architecture and time spent searching a large number of architectures. For the ISRU architecture search, the single-level approaches on average covered ~300 architectures with ~5000 function evaluations. A heuristic-based dual-level approach covered ~266 architectures with ~5,500 function evaluations.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2009

Author dc:creator

• Chepko, Ariane (Ariane Brooke)

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Olivier de Weck.

• Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/50605

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/50605