Structural design of Super Pressure Balloon Habitat on the moon

Abstract

This paper studies the design of a deployable structure, with a background on scientific balloons, in order to simulate a future habitat station for human exploration on the moon. Super Pressure Balloons were considered because of their high resistant to internal pressure due to its lobed shape. This design analysis considers the Lobed pumpkin with lobed cylinder shape for the finite element stress analysis. The produced forms were transformed into structural models in Karamba (Finite Element Analysis) Plugin. Some limitations such as support points, loads, cross-section, and material have been determined for analyzing the stress behaviour of the membrane for the Moon Habitat. Two different shapes are analyzed from a different starting surface and mesh, a relationship between different deployment shape will be compared according to the FE analysis results. The analysis result focuses on the way a designer can interact with the search computational procedure, driving it towards the desired solution.We made a potential sizing assumption regarding the fairing size; we choose SpaceX Falcon Heavy because it has the largest payload fairing internal volume.