Hyper-Insulated Instrumentation System to Support Year-Round Research in Polar Regions

Magee Scientific Company, Berkeley CA

Investigators

Abstract

Year-round scientific research in Polar Regions is seriously challenged by the ambient environment. Extreme low temperatures, six-month darkness, high winds, and icing, create substantial problems for remote instrumentation stations to operate unattended for a year or more. Consequently, many research projects experience loss of data or the simple inability to acquire data over extended areas or periods of time, leading to substantial temporal and geographical gaps in our knowledge of these critical regions. The ability to deploy an instrumentation package that could survive these conditions and gather data unattended for one or multiple years would help to fill these gaps. Additionally, the risks and logistical costs of accessing a remote site even on a yearly basis can be very considerable in some cases, depending on location. The availability of instrumentation support capable of operating for multiple years would allow the research community to plan data-gathering networks that could be supported at a reasonable cost and with less risk. This type of system could also support year-round research at locations that have well-developed summer camps, yet which are unoccupied and inaccessible during the winter. This award provides support to build and test a 'Hyper-Insulated Instrumentation System', an enclosure which synthesizes a number of recent developments in an innovative manner. It will contribute to the polar regions scientific research infrastructure by providing a warm, powered environment for an instrumentation payload, with a 'passive' design endurance of 10,000 hours when buried in a shallow snow pit at -60 (more or less) C. Insulation will be provided by a large-capacity metal dewar flask as now used in biotechnology for preserving samples in liquid nitrogen; thermal storage will be provided by the latent heat of fusion of 150 liters of specially-formulated paraffin oil; electrical energy will be supplied by lithium-ion batteries as recently developed for military applications. The addition of solar panels will offer multi-year operation, by recharging the system electrically and thermally during the summer. An 'Iridium' modem will provide communications to report on system status and transmit summaries of scientific data stored on solid-state memory. The system will be designed for transportation to remote field sites by helicopter or 'Twin Otter' aircraft, and handling by no more than two people. The system will be developed and tested with one year-long deployment at South Pole Station in Antarctica. For testing purposes the system will be equipped with an array of temperature probes as commonly used for glaciology research, but the system will be explicitly designed to be able to accommodate almost any 'payload package' of data-gathering equipment. An undergraduate engineering student will be involved with aspects of the thermal and data-communications design and field testing of the equipment and the project will constitute a large part of the student's undergraduate thesis.