Electrical Load Management and Control in Space Habitat Microgrids

This paper discusses the different electric load profiles and schedules in extraterrestrial microgrids. It also highlights the criticality of load management and prioritization in maintaining the high resilience of future space habitats. A load prioritization algorithm that enables autonomous operation of the microgrid is proposed. Using a space habitat modular model developed by the NASA-funded Resilient Extraterrestrial Habitats Institute (RETHi)<sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sup>, this paper studies the effect of system failure and assesses the proposed management algorithm through simulation results for different disturbance scenarios. A cyber-physical testbed (CPT) including power hardware in the loop (PHIL) are implemented to validate the operation of the different habitat systems and proposed algorithms.