Design, Construction, and Testing of an Autonomous Instrument Shelter for Remote Antarctica

Abstract

The Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL) has been contracted to design and build an Autonomous Real-time Remote Observatory (ARRO) instrument shelter for deployment in Antarctica. The challenge is to maintain an environmental temperature within the shelter not significantly lower than 0 °C in the extreme Antarctic environment where temperatures drop to –80 °C and the average temperature is below –50 °C. Greatly compounding the difficulty of this task is the reliance entirely on renewable energy sources. Energy is stored both electrically in batteries and thermally in water. In order to evaluate alternatives CRREL has constructed an energy model of the system. This model accounts for all the major heat losses from the shelter including heat loss through walls, optical domes, instrumentation cable access ports, and infiltration heat loss. The heat balance on the interior components includes heat flows to/from the thermal storage media (water), to/from the batteries, and waste heat from the instrumentation and controls contained in the shelter. A simple model of the wind turbine generator output has also been included in the system model. A full-scale ARRO was constructed, instrumented and tested in one of CRREL's environmental chambers at –50 °C. This paper describes the design approach, full-scale test, and presents results of model calculations compared with measured values obtained during testing. A prediction of the shelter performance in Antarctica will be presented.