Sustainable Mars manufacturing - energy?

TwinBeam · 2006-06-24 22:25:54

A Mars colony is going to need energy and lots of it - not just to survive, but to establish a manufacturing base for producing at least glass and metals and fuel - likely a much wider range of materials - in order to grow.

Nuclear power is pretty much required to bootstrap a Mars colony - but how about the longer term? Building a new nuclear reactor may be a bit beyond the capabilities of a small but growing colony - high pressure steam pipes, high temperature/pressure turbines, electronics for monitoring and controlling the reactor, and of course processing fuel and spent fuel (Earth is unlikely to be willing to keep launching radioactive fuel).

Most likely there are no fossil fuels (though we could be surprised). Solar electric collectors have dust issues on top of the questions of manufacturing them and the lower solar intensity.

Very large solar concentrating mirrors might work acceptably, and not be too difficult to produce locally. So assume you've got a concentrated heat source - how do you use it for processing and manufacturing? You'd need to think low tech and crude.

E.g. dig a conical pit in the rock, dump in metal ore, and direct the mirror's hot point onto that, scrape off the dross to leave the molten metal. Tap that off to a deeper pit to fill molds. (Rather than waste the heat to simple cooling, maybe use that heat to run chemical processs, or at least to heat the habs.)

Grypd · 2006-06-25 12:43:02

Nuclear will be esential for the first Mars bases, but as we get more settled there is other options to increase our power supply capacity.

Obviously the first is tapping the water aquifers and using the pressure to power turbines and so generate electricity. This will give us the advantage of power instantly on tap (pun intended ). But this power supply is limited to the locations of these aquifers. We could also theoretically create dams to trap water liberated by these aquifers so that we then have another means to generate electricity, again location limited.

A soletta array increasing light to the surface would allow solar to become an option but wont work at night.

Another option is to reduce power needed by using heat trapping systems. These using heat pumps and the difference in ground and air tempature to transfer heat to warm or to cool our buildings.

But these are doable now my hope is though that by the time we get to Mars we will have Fusion powerstations and so our energy problems will no longer be there.

neilzero · 2006-06-27 20:06:57

Hi grypd: what is a soletta?
GEO altitude is about 1/2 as high for Mars, so a very large mirror could easily double the average solar flux and supply the extra energy most of the night and part of the day over a million of square miles of the surface of Mars. The catch is the miror needs about 2 million square miles of effective surface. Neil

Grypd · 2006-06-28 04:15:40

Herman Oberth wrote a book called the Ways and means to space navigation in the 1920s. He postulated the first use of space mirrors and coined the term Soletta from Italian as a fancy name for this artificial reflected sun.

Calling it a soletta array is just us deciding that there is no way we can build one of these things in a single piece and that by using add ons we can build it piece by piece.

Soletta's are an essential for any plan we have to develop a terraforming plan for Mars. Mars with its distance recieves a lot less light than we get actually about a quarter and increasing sunlight energy arriving on the planet makes sense as a first stage to terraformation.

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#1 2006-06-24 22:25:54

Re: Sustainable Mars manufacturing - energy?

#2 2006-06-25 12:43:02

Re: Sustainable Mars manufacturing - energy?

#3 2006-06-27 20:06:57

Re: Sustainable Mars manufacturing - energy?

#4 2006-06-28 04:15:40

Re: Sustainable Mars manufacturing - energy?

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