Abstract
As a kind of in-situ resource utilization, the regolith thermal energy storage is a promising way to solve the energy crisis of manmade moon base during the long lunar nighttime of 350 h. In this paper, a lunar regolith thermal storage system is designed and two different stacking methods of lunar regolith spheres are proposed, the thermal storage characteristics of stacked lunar regolith spheres is investigated numerically. The porous media model is applied to simulate the transient temperature and helium flow fields inside regolith thermal reservoir. The influences of regolith sphere diameter and pump pressure on the performance of a lunar regolith thermal reservoir are analyzed. The results show that there exist optimization regolith sphere diameter and pump pressure to the performance of regolith thermal energy reservoir. The optimization circular pump pressure for helium flow is dependent on the stacking method. When the pump pressure increases over 450 Pa, the face centered cubes (FCC) stacking method shows a maximum advantage of 305.6 kWh heat storage amount over the simple cubes (SC) stacking method. The designed lunar regolith thermal reservoir has the thermal storage density of 0.25 kWh kg−1 for one lunar day.
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