George Thomas works at the NASA Glenn Research Center, where he specializes in both modeling, simulation, and analysis of conceptual power management and distribution systems for space and aeronautics applications, as well as development of inverters to enable a lunar surface AC power grid. George’s previous work at NASA included hardware in the loop testing, propulsion system control research, and in a previous job, George was a consumer electronics engineer. He received his Master’s degree in electrical engineering from Cleveland State University in 2014.
NASA’s long-term vision includes manned missions to the surface of Mars, however there are significant challenges towards these missions. The mission to Mars must include infrastructure that can operate autonomously, in a sustained fashion, and in harsh environments outside of low earth orbit. The most fundamental piece of infrastructure for these Mars missions is planetary surface electrical power, as all other required pieces of infrastructure need power. NASA’s shorter-term goals include demonstration of these Mars-enabling infrastructure technologies on the moon, starting during the latter Artemis missions. One fundamentally enabling technology is long-distance power transmission. This presentation will describe NASA’s universal modular interface converter (UMIC), which will connect 120 V DC space power equipment to a 3 kV AC grid, and which is intended to enable continuous transmission of 1s to 10s of kW of electrical power over several kilometers of distance, to support Artemis and future lunar missions. The existence of this grid will lower the cost of entry for new missions or partners, as the availability of grid power may mean these entities do not need to carry power sources as a part of their payloads. Also, the fact that the different distributed energy resources (DERs) expected to be connected to this grid will be based on different technologies (e.g. distributed solar, nuclear, batteries, and fuel cells), means that the resulting power grid will feature dissimilar redundancy, and will therefore have a higher reliability of power than any site can offer by itself. The presentation will describe the UMIC technology, the state of development of a breadboard version of the UMIC, and an interface standard informed by the breadboard that will enable multiple vendors to independently build interoperable UMIC compliant hardware that can enable a lunar grid.
Attendees will learn about recent NASA work to specify suitable design parameters for an Artemis scale lunar surface power grid, and to develop a grid interface converter to those specifications to share power between localized lunar DC power systems.
Attendees will learn about basic knowledge about grid forming inverters being developed for lunar surface applications.
