Engineering topics
Publications and source records attributed to Muller, L..
The number of spacecraft designed and built over the next century will grow exponentially as communication satellite networks proliferate and NASA continues to push towards the development of many microspacecraft to replace its traditional.
The need to significantly reduce the mass, power, and volume of future scientific spacecraft has resulted in an increased interest on the part of NASA in the relatively new technology of microelectro- mechanical systems (MEMS). In addition to being light, compact and low-power-consuming, this technology offers other advantages to space applications, such as high performance solid-state reliability.
Due to the shrinking NASA budget, future scientific spacecraft programs will be driven by their "life cycle" cost.
A device for generating motive force through the expansion of a dense, nonelastic fluid is described. It consists of an exterior block of a material with a low expansion coefficient, the interior of which is equipped with two circular cavities, both of which are equipped with rotors having blades constantly stressed outward by springs, so that they make contact with the cavity walls. One cavity is heated externally, and both have an exterior wall made of a friction ring which keeps the volume constant when their length varies. These cavities are interconnected by ducts which, at the inlet, are a prolongation of a peripheral groove made in the friction ring. The excess fluid produced by expansion flows through the groove, subsequently entering the cavity again after passing through a cooler located in the exterior part of the block. Both rotors are connected to gears with appropriate ratios which are equipped with a blocking device to guarantee that they always rotate in the same direction.