BEIA Consult attended International Conference of Aerospace Sciences “AEROSPATIAL 2018” with a paper entitled “Concurrent engineering in designing a system for sensing gas leaks in harsh space environment”.
Leak monitoring is an essential operation that must be taken into consideration while making the design of a spatial vehicle. In order to make these vehicles function correctly in space and to avoid disasters, one needs to integrate multiple sensors to determine the exact concentrations of fuels such as hydrogen, hydrazine, hydrocarbon or oxygen which are frequently used while launching a space vehicle. These concentrations are important, as hydrogen-oxygen mixtures can ignite with a very small amount of energy. Moreover, it is almost impossible for people to sense the presence of hydrogen, as this gas is odorless and colorless.
The goal of this paper is the describe the concept of an intelligent system that will monitor the presence of oxygen, hydrogen gas in harsh space environments such as vacuum, temperature variations and also beta and gamma radiations. Therefore, some aspects such as the weight of the device or environmental conditions must be taken into consideration when doing concurrent engineering. Micro and nanotechnologies allow the presence of multiple sensors without increasing the size, the weight or the energy consumption. Also, they must resist harsh conditions from space.
