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Spinning space station design

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Is it cold in here?:
Or regenerative braking. I bet there's a lot of stored energy in the station's rotation and that you could ride out an eclipse without causing disturbing shifts in people's apparent weight.

pwhodges:
Braking against what?  In this situation you're really speaking of using a faster flywheel to store energy.

Skewbrow:
Is it beyond the capacity of batteries? Recharge them when in sunlight, use them when in the dark. The Earth's shadow comes and goes in a 90 minute cycle after all. I'm no engineer, so cannot guesstimate, whether batteries can store enough electricity to run the station for 45 minutes. Without filling up the entire station with those batteries that is?

Deadlywonky:
The Qinetiq Zephyr had enough battery capacity to fly through the night, loosing 10-15,000 feet in the process, obviously its an aircraft, not a station but in principle if weight wasn't' an issue you could have as much space devoted to batteries as you needed. The problem would be the charge/discharge cycle, even deep cycle batteries are only good for a few thousand cycles, and if you are discharging several times a day (orbit dependent) then they won't last too many years before they need to be replaced.

using a separate flywheel is out, and unless you can realistically decelerate the station to generate power and then accelerate it in sunlight (is this possible with a large enough station and not affect g?)

the two best options i see are a closed loop fuel cell/electrolysis unit but even this will have a limited operational life, dependent on the membrane. Or a 'nuclear battery' such as one of the larger SNAP units developed by NASA but this would require deactivation of many of the systems during the 'night' as I assume that the SNAP won't be able to generate enough power to keep the entire station running (otherwise what is the point of the solar panels).

Is it cold in here?:

--- Quote from: pwhodges on 17 Feb 2012, 02:03 ---Braking against what?  In this situation you're really speaking of using a faster flywheel to store energy.

--- End quote ---

Conservation of angular momentum means the station's rotation will speed up or slow down as you speed up or slow down the flywheel.

The solar panels could be there to sustain operations while the antimatter reactor was being refueled, and to bootstrap it afterward.

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