Tenders are invited for DESIGN OF CONTAINMENT TECHNIQUES FOR BATTERIES STORED ENERGY AT THE EOL - EXPRO PLUS

DESIGN OF CONTAINMENT TECHNIQUES FOR BATTERIES STORED ENERGY AT THE EOL - EXPRO PLUS More than 60 years of space activities have left more than 17000 trackable orbital debris. More than 290 in-orbit fragmentation events have been registered from which less than 10 were collisions; the majority of the events were explosions of spacecraft and upper stages. Passivation operations in power and propulsion systems are currently performed on a best effort basis and not all the energy is depleted. The uncompleted depletion can lead to explosions which would generate even more debris. Nowadays, an increasing number of small satellites is foreseen. Those satellites have a low reliability and therefore a cheap solution to contain the energy released by the explosion of the batteries is required.Two steps are considered:1) Analysis phase: To size and understand the energy released due to the explosion of the battery.2) Bread-boarding: To design and breadboard a containment system for small satellites based on the results on the energy analysisThe activity encompasses the following tasks:- To estimate the energy released by the explosion of small batteries used in small satellites (taking into consideration different cells types)- To understand how the batteries explode taking into consideration possible cascade effects that the explosion of a cell can cause (to the adjacent cells and on the module) and the batteries behavior with respect to different levels of charge and level of temperature.- To assess the scalability of the energy measured to different size of batteries- To assess the representativeness of the tests to different types of batteries- To design a containment system for small satellites based on the results of the energy analysis. The containment system has to retain the energy and fragments of the battery after it explodes and has to survive exposure to the space environment during the whole life of the satellite. Furthermore, this system needs to be cheap, light, and demisable which have minimal footprint on the spacecraft.- To produce a breadboard of the containment system and perform preliminary testing. Read less