14 research outputs found
Battery system development - Assembly planning between lightweight design and high volume production
Battery systems of electric vehicles suffer from low energy densities as well as high masses and geometrical complexity. The absence of standards for battery cells and peripheral components in combination with large and distributed design spaces within passenger vehicles open up innumerable possibilities to design battery systems. The results are product specific and uneconomical assembly systems. This paper describes the work of the TU Braunschweig to create a methodology that generates and evaluates modular and easy to assemble battery systems based upon user requirements. This methodology gathers and links requirements between the priorities "lightweight design" and "high volume production" including a partly automated generation of CAD data. The generated concepts are directly used for assembly planning. The presented methodology therefore represents a simultaneous engineering approach that shortens development time and supports design engineers as well as process planners
The composition of the protosolar disk and the formation conditions for comets
Conditions in the protosolar nebula have left their mark in the composition
of cometary volatiles, thought to be some of the most pristine material in the
solar system. Cometary compositions represent the end point of processing that
began in the parent molecular cloud core and continued through the collapse of
that core to form the protosun and the solar nebula, and finally during the
evolution of the solar nebula itself as the cometary bodies were accreting.
Disentangling the effects of the various epochs on the final composition of a
comet is complicated. But comets are not the only source of information about
the solar nebula. Protostellar disks around young stars similar to the protosun
provide a way of investigating the evolution of disks similar to the solar
nebula while they are in the process of evolving to form their own solar
systems. In this way we can learn about the physical and chemical conditions
under which comets formed, and about the types of dynamical processing that
shaped the solar system we see today.
This paper summarizes some recent contributions to our understanding of both
cometary volatiles and the composition, structure and evolution of protostellar
disks.Comment: To appear in Space Science Reviews. The final publication is
available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11214-015-0167-
Triple F-a comet nucleus sample return mission
The Triple F (Fresh From the Fridge) mission, a Comet Nucleus Sample Return, has been proposed to ESAâs Cosmic Vision program. A sample return from a comet enables us to reach the ultimate goal of cometary research. Since comets are the least processed bodies in the solar system, the proposal goes far beyond cometary science topics (like the explanation of cometary activity) and delivers invaluable information about the formation of the solar system and the interstellar molecular cloud from which it formed. The proposed mission would extract three sample cores of the upper 50 cm from three locations on a cometary nucleus and return them cooled to Earth for analysis in the laboratory. The simple mission concept with a touch-and-go sampling by a single spacecraft was proposed as an M-class mission in collaboration with the Russian space agency ROSCOSMOS.ISSN:0922-6435ISSN:1572-950