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The following items should be considered:
For power storage and production systems, a 50kW electrical output should be used as a baseline for comparison purposes. From this point the technologies can be scaled as appropriate. This figure should be raw electrical output, after any internal power consumption such as fuel pumps or heat regenerators. Assume direct electrical output, voltage TBD, since the vast majority of applications would be electrical, including electric-drive vehicles.
System characteristics which should be described, for comparison purposes:
Power and mass density (Watts/ m^3, kilograms per m^3).
Acceptable energy input form (e.g. fuel, electricity, sunlight).
Fuel/energy input per Watt out. (e.g. Watts/liter, Watts/lux).
Efficiency (power out as a percentage of maximum possible power obtainable from the input fuel or electricity. For a chemical engine this would be the maximum theoretical energy obtained from the reaction; losses would be generated by reaction inefficiencies and internal power consumption; for solar cells this would be conversion efficiency; for batteries or super-caps this would encompass storage losses and internal resistance, and possibly losses due to control circuitry.)
scaling rules, if the technology is not linearly scalable (e.g. a 100kW generator would not be twice the size of a 50kW.)
Required heat dissipation into the environment, in Watts
Material exhausted into the lunar environment (kg/year). At present it is desirable to keep this to a minimum in order to avoid contamination of industrial processes using the lunar vacuum.
Assume that all output products are captured and stored in some form. The general idea is that they will be stored until lunar daylight, or return to base, and converted back into fuel, or recharged, using solar energy. Storing the exhaust products introduces some inefficiency, but 1) it should be more cost effective to recycle the scarce fuel sources, and 2) we don't want to contaminate that nice industrial-grade vacuum any more than necessary. This implies that fuels should _be_ recyclable fairly easily. I would suggest that all combustion engines and fuel cells should run on something like H2/O2 or CH4/O2, where the reverse reaction is fairly straightforward. If not, than the exhaust should be biodegradable - we'll simply feed it to the plants in the greenhouse and use it to generate methane. (Vietnamese pot-bellied pigs as an essential part of the space habitat?)
Derived from ADB Template, ADB 9.4.1
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