Wright-Patterson AFB Hosts Thermal System Modeling Course

Matt Moran, Managing Partner at Isotherm Energy, taught his two day course on thermal system modeling at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base (WPAFB) on Sep 11-12, 2017. Civilian and military engineers involved in spacecraft thermal control attended the course.

Below is a screeenshot from one of the many application examples presented to demonstrate how to use the techniques taught in the course. This model was created for a USAF solar orbit transfer vehicle concept for boosting satellites into higher orbit to extend their useful life. A solar concentrator is used to drive a Thermoacoustic Stirling Heat Engine (TASHE) based on DOE technology, which in turn powers a two stage pulse tube cryocooler based on NIST technology. The cryocooler, along with other advanced thermal management techniques, maintains the hydrogen propellant in cryogenic liquid condition. When the SOTV attaches to the spacecraft being boosted, the solar concentrator is articulated to be used for its secondary function - heating the hydrogen as it passes through a nozzle for propulsion. The TASHE and integrated cryocooler were designed, built and successfully tested based in part on the results from this model.

Another example application was a cryogenic system design tool originally created for the Missile Defense Agency for a space-based laser concept (see screenshot below). This model performs engineering trades and optimization based on: orbital sink temperatures, insulation configuration, fluid type, operating temperatures and pressures, tank material and structures, tank geometry, and active cooling options. The versatility of the model allowed its continued use for a variety of other projects.

In addition to aerospace applications, Isotherm Energy has leveraged its experience with power and propulsion systems to address emerging energy sector challenges. Many of the capabilities shown in the above models have direct application in sustainable energy systems, such as: solar concentrators, heat engines, combined heat & power, and energy storage (e.g. hydrogen, compressed air, liquid air, liquid nitrogen, etc.)

Matt Moran is the Managing Member at Moran Innovation, and previous Managing Partner at Isotherm Energy. He's been developing power and propulsion systems since 1982. Matt was also the Sector Manager for Energy & Materials in his last position at NASA where he worked for 31 years. He's been involved in seven technology based start-ups; and provided R&D and engineering support to many industrial, government and research organizations.  More about Matt here…

Largest Liquid Hydrogen Dewar Tank (Ever)

NASA Kennedy Space Center Liquid Hydrogen Dewar Tank (credits: NASA/Kim Shiflett)

Isotherm Energy has been awarded a subcontract to provide support for development of the largest hydrogen dewar tank in history at the NASA Kennedy Space Center (KSC). As previously reported by NASA, the new dewar will hold well over one million gallons of liquid hydrogen and is 50% larger than the current record holder that supported space shuttle launches for 30 years (see above).

A primary focus of Isotherm Energy’s support is the analysis, design and integration of a new technology that eliminates hydrogen loss during storage. Shawn Quinn, assistant program manager of NASA KSC Ground Systems Development and Operations (GSDO), explained how the dewar and its unique capabilities will support the new Space Launch System [1], “…GSDO will fill the rocket's core stage and interim cryogenic upper stage with hundreds of thousands of gallons of liquid hydrogen. An important feature of the new zero boil-off technology is the potential to reduce long-term energy costs and liquid hydrogen commodity costs."

This key capability will build upon previous research demonstrations done by NASA to investigate an integrated system that can provide liquefaction, propellant densification, and zero boil-off. “The goal would be to integrate the unit's heat exchange system into the new tank, saving GSDO money by eliminating the loss of hydrogen”, according to Bill Notardonato, principal investigator for the 33,000 gallon demonstration unit (shown below) [2]. “By accomplishing zero boil-off of liquid hydrogen, we could save one dollar in hydrogen for every 20 cents spent on electricity to keep it cooled.”

(Photo credit: NASA/Cory Huston)

The successful design and operation of a liquid hydrogen storage system at this scale with zero boil-off, liquefaction and densification capabilities has far reaching implications even beyond the space program. For example, Isotherm Energy has developed a hydrogen energy storage architecture and associated system development software for renewable power sources (among other applications). The demonstrated ability to economically eliminate hydrogen losses for such a system – not to mention liquefy gaseous hydrogen and subcool the resulting liquid – would be a significant game changer.

[1] “Ultra-Cold Storage – Liquid Hydrogen May Be Fuel of the Future”, Amanda Griffin and Linda Herridge, NASA KSC, Dec 14, 2016.

[2] Ibid.

Matt Moran is the Managing Member at Moran Innovation, and previous Managing Partner at Isotherm Energy. He's been developing power and propulsion systems since 1982. Matt was also the Sector Manager for Energy & Materials in his last position at NASA where he worked for 31 years. He's been involved in seven technology based start-ups; and provided R&D and engineering support to many industrial, government and research organizations.  More about Matt here…

Hydrogen System Architecture and Software Demo

The variability of wind and solar energy sources presents a challenge for meeting electrical load requirements. Isotherm Energy has developed a system architecture for addressing this challenge that provides energy storage, potable water, and hydrogen fuel production. The architecture enables tailoring of system parameters to meet specific application requirements using current and emerging technologies.

Click here to view a demonstration of the software

Isotherm Energy is developing a suite of software tools to simulate, analyze and design systems based on our hydrogen storage system architecture. The software allows selection of various input energy sources, water sources, biomass and other inputs. Subsequent screens allow the selection of options for hydrogen production, storage, byproducts, power generation, heat recovery, power output, excess hydrogen, and water management.

Once the architecture options are selected, the software generates a system model that incorporates all the chosen parameters. The system model calculates all energy and mass flows between subsystems along with heat available for recovery and improved overall system performance. Note that all system flows are driven by the load following function of the power management and distribution (PMAD) subsystem and calculated accordingly.

 

The system model has an optional time stamp capability for the conditions being simulated. When the “Save Conditions” button is clicked, all of the parameters associated with the time stamped simulation are stored for subsequent transient analysis. In this manner, a sequence of simulated hours, days, weeks or a full year can be automatically generated and investigated. Every parameter of the system can then be adjusted using built-in optimization tools to meet the performance goals over any timeframe of interest.

The software also provides complete flexibility in the selection of system variables such as electrical load and energy inputs. These can be a constant number at a given timestamp, a historical profile, a statistical distribution over a time averaged period, a stochastic probabilistic algorithm (e.g. Monte Carlo), or some other user defined method.

New capabilities under development include:

• Detailed subsystem and component models
• Drop-in capability for existing and emerging technologies
• Comparison to other storage options (e.g. batteries, compressed air, pumped hydro, etc.)
• Capital/operating expenditures, payback period, levelized cost of energy and other financial

Matt Moran is the Managing Member at Moran Innovation, and previous Managing Partner at Isotherm Energy. He's been developing power and propulsion systems since 1982. Matt was also the Sector Manager for Energy & Materials in his last position at NASA where he worked for 31 years. He's been involved in seven technology based start-ups; and provided R&D and engineering support to many industrial, government and research organizations.  More about Matt here…

NASA Johnson Space Center Hosts Engineering Course

Matt Moran taught his popular course on Excel VBA for engineers at the NASA Johnson Space Center on August 8-10. The course provides in-depth details on principles, practices, and implementation of Excel and its integrated programing language – Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) – for analysis and engineering model creation.

Techniques and methods taught in the course allow the creation of custom engineering models for: analyzing conceptual designs, creating system trades, simulating operation, optimizing performance, and more. Matt has taught this course to hundreds of participants since 2007, and hundreds more have purchased his published course notes in paperback and Kindle versions.

Newly remodeled training building at NASA Johnson Space Center where course was held.

Matt Moran is the Managing Member at Moran Innovation, and previous Managing Partner at Isotherm Energy. He's been developing power and propulsion systems since 1982. Matt was also the Sector Manager for Energy & Materials in his last position at NASA where he worked for 31 years. He's been involved in seven technology based start-ups; and provided R&D and engineering support to many industrial, government and research organizations.  More about Matt here…

The Path to Greenhouse Gas Emission Reduction (Part 1)

Last week I participated in a business roundtable discussion in Toronto hosted by Canada’s Ontario Centres of Excellence (OCE).  The focus of the meeting was to bring together industry emitters and solution providers for a collective discussion about how to meet the province’s greenhouse gas emission reduction target of 37% below 1990 levels by the year 2030.

These types of conversations are occurring around the world in various forms as each nation participating in the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris formulate policies to meet the emission goals agreed upon.  Although the implementation details will undoubtedly vary within the global community, many of the key challenges and opportunities are common to all.

In preparation for the meeting, the OCE requested feedback from the invited participants regarding the appropriate path forward, the roles each of us can play, and the barriers to success.  I believe these questions form a useful framework for many governments that are grappling with the same issues.

Clean the Smokestack?

OCE welcomes industry stakeholder feedback on the following questions: Looking forward to 2030 and Ontario’s GHG emissions target of 37% below 1990 levels, what do you view as the path forward for the Province to meet this emission reduction target?

Isotherm Energy: There are two general approaches to lowering emissions:

1. Reduction of emissions between the combustion source and the smokestack. This is a near term solution that reduces atmospheric emissions, but must still address the captured carbon. Enable greater adoption of renewable sources to accelerate transition away from fossil fuels. This is a mid-term solution that addresses the problem at the source by reducing carbon based fuels. A balance of these two approaches is ideal.
2. The “clean the smokestack” approach is by far the historically favored solution to reducing airborne emissions of all kinds.  My experience with this approach started with my first engineering job in 1982 at a 2200 MW coal-fired power plant.  The plant was finishing a nearly half-billion dollar installation of precipitators to remove particulates from the smokestacks to meet regulations.  At the time, the industry was denying any connection between the sulfur contained in the coal being burned and acid rain miles away in the direction of the prevailing winds aloft.  Many years later, the same plant finally made a capital investment of nearly two billion dollars to install flue gas scrubbers that remove most of the sulfur dioxide and nitrous oxide emissions, again to meet regulatory requirements.  No doubt, they are now looking at an even larger price tag for reducing carbon emissions.

Of course, this smokestack approach is not unique to the stationary power generation industry.  In 1985, I was recruited by NASA to develop space experiments for the space shuttle to study the effects of low gravity on combustion phenomena.  During our early development testing in drop towers on earth that provide a few seconds of weightlessness, we filmed the formation of soot emanating from liquid hydrocarbon fuel droplets that had never been previously observed nor predicted.

Hydrocarbon droplet combustion soot formed during a drop tower test at NASA

In a subsequent discussion about soot formation with one of our principal investigators, he commented that soot is a big health problem, and used diesel fuel as an example.  He explained that there is an upper limit on size above which the lungs can expel an inhaled particle, and a lower limit below which a particle is absorbed into the body via the alveoli in the lungs.  But for sizes between those upper and lower limits, the lungs can neither expel nor absorb a particle.  And diesel soot particles are in that size range that can become permanently entrapped in the lungs.  That’s why diesel trucks have their tail pipe exit so high above the ground, he concluded.

Observing this smokestack approach to airborne emissions reveals some inherent recurring patterns.  These include very long cycles of:

• Growing evidence regarding the detrimental impacts of a particular emission
• Public denials of the data by entrenched interests
• Eventual policies and regulations to address the issue
• Costly implementation of commercially available systems targeting the emission

These cycles often take decades to culminate in the reduction of the target emission, while it’s detrimental health and environmental impacts continue to grow in the interim.  And in the end, another symptom of the core problem is addressed without addressing the root cause: the combustion of hydrocarbon fuels.

In my next post, I’ll touch on the second part of the answer we gave the OCE for the path forward.  Accelerating the adoption of renewable energy sources requires systems integration, application optimization, and sustainable energy storage.

Matt Moran is the Managing Member at Moran Innovation, and previous Managing Partner at Isotherm Energy. He's been developing power and propulsion systems since 1982. Matt was also the Sector Manager for Energy & Materials in his last position at NASA where he worked for 31 years. He's been involved in seven technology based start-ups; and provided R&D and engineering support to many industrial, government and research organizations.  More about Matt here…

Carbon Neutral Liquid Fuels

The U.S. Department of Energy’s ARPA-E recently announced funding for a new program to support technology development proposals that use renewable energy to convert air and water into “carbon neutral liquid fuels (CNLF)”.  These cost-competitive, energy dense fuels must be storable, transportable and convertible to hydrogen or electricity.

Examples of CNLFs include: ammonia, hydrazine hydrate, carbohydrazide, and synthetic hydrocarbons that extract carbon from air or water thus meeting the carbon neutral criteria.  The overarching goal is to find suitable substitutes for carbon dioxide emitting transportation fuels like gasoline and diesel while retaining their advantageous energy density, storability and compatibility with the existing distribution infrastructure.

Perhaps paradoxically, “carbon zero” liquid hydrogen is specifically excluded from consideration.  No doubt, there are programmatic reasons for this exclusion based on other efforts in the DOE portfolio and investments previously made in hydrogen technologies and systems development.  But there are also technical reasons to look beyond liquid hydrogen.

The Challenges with Liquid Hydrogen

Hydrogen’s low volumetric density and cryogenic normal boiling point of -253 C poses unique challenges.  ARPA-E’s funding announcement document  succinctly describes how this impacts storage and distribution:

“Hydrogen compression and, especially, liquefaction incur additional energy losses (up to 10 and 35%, respectively). In contrast to liquid H2, which boils-off with a rate of 1 – 4% per day depending on the tank, hydrogen storage and transportation as a compressed gas has very low losses. Therefore, the latter is a more attractive option for long-term storage (from days to seasonal).” — Source: “Renewable Energy To Fuels Through Utilization Of Energy-Dense Liquids (REFUEL)”, Funding Opportunity No. DE-FOA-0001563, April 26, 2016.

While the above may be true for currently available commercial systems, liquefaction energy and boil-off losses can be significantly reduced with proven technologies developed in the aerospace industry.  In fact, zero boil-off liquid hydrogen systems have been developed by NASA and other aerospace organizations with combinations of advanced insulation, optimized structural/penetration design, Joule–Thomson cooling, para-to-ortho conversion cooling, crycoolers, and other technologies and innovative design features.  An example test article is shown below.

Source: Hastings, et al., “Large-Scale Demonstration of Liquid Hydrogen Storage With Zero Boiloff for In-Space Applications”, NASA TP-2010-216453.

Keep It Local?

The table below shows parameters for evaluating the full costs of delivery transportation power using carbon-free energy sources from the subject ARPA-E funding announcement .  Note that there’s an inherent assumption in this table that’s an artifact of our current transportation fuels paradigm that’s not in the footnotes.

Source: REFUEL announcement, April 26, 2016.

By necessity, the evolution of our fossil fuel industries and infrastructure has been largely predicated on geographic separation of extraction, refining/processing and point of use.  Oil or coal or natural gas doesn’t exist in every location where their derivative products are used.  In addition to the far reaching geopolitical ramifications, this reality has resulted in the need for a vast distribution system to service every link in the fossil fuel supply chain.

But is this a mandatory constraint in a carbon-less energy ecosystem based on renewable energy sources and hydrogen?  Renewable energy sources can be found anywhere, along with local sources for hydrogen production.  It’s interesting to consider the case where transportation costs of hydrogen are not applicable due to production and point of use occurring in the same location.  In that scenario, the total source-to-energy cost for hydrogen in the previous table becomes lower than the other carbon-free energy sources shown.

Many Paths Forward

Some combination of CNLFs, along with carbon-free hydrogen, will provide a transition path away from fossil fuels in transportation and stationary energy systems.  Isotherm Energy is positioned for whatever that combination may turn out to be with our hydrogen energy architecture.  Any of the CNLF options are compatible since they can be readily integrated into our architecture and processed into hydrogen at the point of use for the target application.  The destination of a more sustainable energy future is worth the journey.

Matt Moran is the Managing Member at Moran Innovation, and previous Managing Partner at Isotherm Energy. He's been developing power and propulsion systems since 1982. Matt was also the Sector Manager for Energy & Materials in his last position at NASA where he worked for 31 years. He's been involved in seven technology based start-ups; and provided R&D and engineering support to many industrial, government and research organizations.  More about Matt here…

Power and Water the NASA Way

We’re sometimes met with a puzzled look at Isotherm Energy when we describe our hydrogen energy system architecture and its ability to store energy, generate power, recover heat, and produce potable water.  It seems the combination of functions – particularly energy and water together - is unfamiliar to many.  After three decades of working at NASA where these types of systems have been routine since the mid-1960s, I hadn’t considered that it might sound odd to those outside the aerospace industry.

A recent article about the famously jinxed Apollo 13 mission describes an early example:

“Apollo 13 lost its electricity, light, and water supply… The loss of an oxygen tank was crippling to an Apollo spacecraft because the oxygen tanks powered the fuel cells that powered the spacecraft… The electrochemical reaction of combining cryogenic hydrogen and oxygen produced electricity, heat, and potable water as byproducts.” [Popular Science, Apr 15, 2016]

Part of an unflown Apollo fuel cell [National Air and Space Museum]

The Space Shuttle also used fuel cells in a similar manner:

“Fuel cells are used in the space shuttle as one component of the electrical power system. Three fuel cell power plants, through a chemical reaction, generate all of the electrical power for the vehicle from launch through landing rollout… are individually coupled to the reactant (hydrogen and oxygen) distribution subsystem, the heat rejection subsystem, the potable water storage subsystem, and the electrical power distribution and control subsystem. The fuel cell power plants generate heat and water as by-products of electrical power generation.” [NASA]

One of the three fuel cells that provides electrical power to the space shuttle orbiter [NASA]

As another more personal example, I was asked in 1991 by NASA Headquarters to conduct a study on launching water to low earth orbit for processing into hydrogen and oxygen propellants to support missions to the moon and Mars.  The published system concept I designed used an electrolyzer to produce the propellants, and then liquefy them for storage until a spacecraft docked for refueling (see schematic below).  We would revisit aspects of this configuration later at NASA when I worked on designs to provide power, propulsion, water and environmental control for lunar surface systems.

Source: “Conceptual Study of on Orbit Production of Cryogenic Propellants by Water Electrolysis”, Moran, 1991.

So the integration of proven aerospace technologies into a combined energy-water-heat recovery architecture was a natural extension of my personal experiences and background.  And I’m convinced it will serve us well as we begin to view our energy, water and food systems here on earth from a more integrated sustainable perspective.

Matt Moran is the Managing Member at Moran Innovation, and previous Managing Partner at Isotherm Energy. He's been developing power and propulsion systems since 1982. Matt was also the Sector Manager for Energy & Materials in his last position at NASA where he worked for 31 years. He's been involved in seven technology based start-ups; and provided R&D and engineering support to many industrial, government and research organizations.  More about Matt here…