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Myles, Timothy D.

Publications and source records attributed to Myles, Timothy D..

4 records
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
NASA NTRS2019

Electrochemical Solutions for Advanced Life Support

The Oxygen Generating Assembly (OGA) on-board the International Space Station (ISS) employs a polymer electrolyte membrane (PEM) water electrolysis cell stack to electrochemically dissociate water into its two components – oxygen and hydrogen. Oxygen is provided to the cabin atmosphere for crew respiration while the hydrogen is delivered to a carbon dioxide reduction system to recover oxygen as water. The design of the OGA evolved over a number of years to arrive at the system solution that is currently operational on ISS. Future manned missions to space will require advanced technologies that eliminate the need for resupply from earth and feature in-situ resource utilization to sustain crew life and to provide useful materials to the crew. The architects planning such missions should consider all potential solutions at their disposal to arrive at an optimal vehicle solution that minimizes crew maintenance time, launch weight, installed volume and energy consumption demands. Skyre is developing new technologies through funding from NASA, the Department of Energy, and internal investment based on PEM technology that could become an integral part of these new vehicle solutions. At varying stages of Technology Readiness Level (TRL) are: an oxygen concentrator and compressor that can separate oxygen from an air stream and provide an enriched oxygen resource for crew medical use and space suit recharge without any moving parts in the pure oxygen stream; a regenerative carbon dioxide removal system featuring a PEM-based sorbent regenerator; a carbon dioxide reduction system that electrochemically produces organic compounds that could serve as fuels or as a useful intermediary to more beneficial compounds; and an electrochemical hydrogen separator and compressor for hydrogen recycle. The technical maturity of these projects is presented along with pertinent performance test data that could be beneficial in future study efforts.

Roy, Robert J.↗
DOE OSTI2015

Extension of anisotropic effective medium theory to account for an arbitrary number of inclusion types

The purpose of this paper is to extend, to multi-components, a previously reported theory for calculating the effective conductivity of a two component mixture. The previously reported theory involved preferentially oriented spheroidal inclusions contained in a continuous matrix, with inclusions oriented relative to a principle axis. This approach was based on Bruggeman's unsymmetrical theory, and is extended to account for an arbitrary number of different inclusion types. The development begins from two well-known starting points; the Maxwell approach and the Maxwell-Garnett approach for dilute mixtures. It is shown that despite these two different starting points, the final Bruggeman type equation is the same. As a means of validating the developed expression, comparisons are made to several existing effective medium theories. It is shown that these existing theories coincide with the developed equations for the appropriate parameter set. Finally, a few example mixtures are considered to demonstrate the effect of multiple inclusions on the calculated effective property. Inclusion types of different conductivities, shapes, and orientations are considered and each of the aforementioned properties is shown to have a potentially significant impact on the calculated mixture property.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗
DOE OSTI2014

Effect of orientation anisotropy on calculating effective electrical conductivities

This paper develops an analytical effective medium theory (EMT) equation for calculating the effective conductivity of a mixture based on Maxwell's and Maxwell-Garnett’s theories, extended to higher volume fractions using Bruggeman's unsymmetrical treatment (BUT), with a long term goal of extending the treatment to mixtures more representative of real materials in order to calculate their effective electrical conductivity. The development accounts for spheroid shaped inclusions of varying degrees of anisotropic orientation. The orientation is described by the introduction of a distribution function. Two methodologies valid for the inclusion dilute limit were used to evaluate the effective conductivity: one based on Maxwell's far field approach, and the other based on the Maxwell-Garnett in the matrix approach. It was found that while the dilute limit equations for the effective conductivity were different, the final EMT equations derived by applying BUT collapsed to the same formula which was generalized for anisotropic orientation based on the distribution function presented.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗