High-Temp Electronics For Venus Exploration, recent advances |
High-Temp Electronics For Venus Exploration, recent advances |
Mar 13 2013, 03:36 PM
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Member Group: Members Posts: 127 Joined: 20-April 05 Member No.: 291 |
(MOD NOTE: Started a new topic for this discussion to continue. Please remember the 'no sci-fi engineering' provision of rule 1.9. Have fun!)
Also, since I'm thinking about surface operations on Venus, the state-of-the-art in high temperature electronics has advanced quite far in the past decade. Its now possible to buy off the shelf chips from vendors designed to operate at the 250-300 C range. Meanwhile basic functionality has been tested at and beyond the temperatures needed for long-term surface operations on Venus: http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/SiC/ http://www.gizmag.com/extreme-silicon-carb...ctronics/16410/ http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/SiC/publicatio...Contact2010.pdf Another decade or so and a long-term Venus lander could be possible with (practically) off the shelf electronics! |
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Mar 13 2013, 05:50 PM
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Member Group: Members Posts: 903 Joined: 30-January 05 Member No.: 162 |
Having electronics operate at a higher temperature works 2 ways to make for a longer operating time on the surface.
Firstly, it takes longer to heat them up more, and also, the rate of heat flow into the probe decreases as the temperature difference between inside and outside decreases. Additionally, having a wider temperature operating range might allow the use of different/better phase change heat absorbents. We could be seeing quite a jump in operating time that's possible. |
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Mar 25 2013, 04:30 PM
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Junior Member Group: Members Posts: 20 Joined: 19-March 13 Member No.: 6897 |
Of course, if you can operate at 500C, you don't need to have phase/change...
Resistors, Capacitors, inductors, all those sorts of things can work at 500C, though not the usual components. A resistor is fundamentally a simple device, as are capacitors and inductors... They can technically be constructed entirely with just some conductor and some insulator material. Now that we have silicon carbide ICs of tens of gates operating at 500C, lots of stuff is possible. A turing-complete computer (provided you have some sort of memory, could be coil or capacitor based) can be made with just a couple hundred gates, though you have to be satisfied with very low performance (maybe just a 4-bit or 8-bit computer, but it's Turing Complete so can simulate higher). Whether it's worth it... |
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Mar 25 2013, 05:02 PM
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Director of Galilean Photography Group: Members Posts: 896 Joined: 15-July 04 From: Austin, TX Member No.: 93 |
Now that we have silicon carbide ICs of tens of gates operating at 500C, lots of stuff is possible. http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/de...ng-temperatures has some interesting details. Problem now isn't the semiconductor per se, but everything around it such as interconnect between the transistors (metal layers) and packaging etc. -------------------- Space Enthusiast Richard Hendricks
-- "The engineers, as usual, made a tremendous fuss. Again as usual, they did the job in half the time they had dismissed as being absolutely impossible." --Rescue Party, Arthur C Clarke Mother Nature is the final inspector of all quality. |
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