Emergency strategy optimization for the environmental control system in manned spacecraft

ABSTRACT

It is very important for a manned environmental control system (ECS) to be able to reconfigure its operation strategy in emergency conditions. In this article, a multi-objective optimization is established to design the optimal emergency strategy for an ECS in an insufficient power supply condition. The maximum ECS lifetime and the minimum power consumption are chosen as the optimization objectives. Some adjustable key variables are chosen as the optimization variables, which finally represent the reconfigured emergency strategy. The non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm-II is adopted to solve this multi-objective optimization problem. Optimization processes are conducted at four different carbon dioxide partial pressure control levels. The study results show that the Pareto-optimal frontiers obtained from this multi-objective optimization can represent the relationship between the lifetime and the power consumption of the ECS. Hence, the preferred emergency operation strategy can be recommended for situations when there is suddenly insufficient power.

KEYWORDS:

• Manned spacecraft
• environmental control system
• emergency strategy
• multi-objective optimization

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Aeronautical Science Foundation of China [2014ZC09002].