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Technical Paper

Feasibility of Using In-Situ Lunar Soil as a Latent Thermal Energy Storage Media

1994-06-01
941328
An experiment was designed, fabricated and tested at the NASA Lewis Research Center to investigate the concept of using the surface layer of the moon to store thermal energy. The concept includes using the energy stored within the surface as a thermal input to drive a solar dynamic power system. The solar dynamic power system would operate using the suns thermal input during the lunar day and would continue to operate during the lunar night using the thermal energy stored within the cavity. The experiment modeled in a lunar thermal energy storage concept by applying a heat flux to the surface of simulated lunar soil equivalent to what a primary and secondary solar concentrator could produce with a concentration ratio of 2000:1. The experiment was designed to determine if the surface layer of the lunar soil could be melted using the equivalent heat flux from a radiative heating element mounted above the simulated lunar soil.
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