I'm very, very tired. Between all my own research, plus co-authoring Wald's paper, I've been trying to model my power system. It's not my field, but while I would normally collaborate with someone with the right expertise I'm trying to do this quietly. I'm still a little shy from getting slapped down by the PI several months ago for what looked like a paranoid outburst about calibration errors in the PPS. I don't really want to draw attention to myself again unless I have something solid to work with.
I have discussed the problem with Mission Support. They were less than supportive, unfortunately. It's clear to me from my own direct experience that my fuel cells are not running up to their capacity. Not even close. Anything energy-intensive like heating water or just running the AC on full will bring down the printer or the crapper. The sustained juice just isn't there when I need it, and it's driving me mad. I can't do my job when half my equipment has to be off-line half the time.
MS assumes that I'm the problem -- that I have something else running and just failed to mention it. They look at the fuel cell self-diagnostics, declare that everything's working right and tell me to turn off unnecessary devices. There are none! I stay professional with them, but frankly it's enough to make me want to punch someone.
The modeling should be simple enough. I grasp the principles -- I put it together the first day. My collector array is a graceful reddish-black flower; eleven long, light petals of photoreceptor around a dynamic hub that points them toward the "sun", in practice just the brightest part of the always-overcast sky. 21 square meters of photoactive enzyme on a carbon matrix turns water, carbon-dioxide and photons into a steady drip of aqueous ethanol. That runs through a tiny pipe to my hab, where my two fuel cells combine it with oxygen. The "burning" creates a tiny potential multiplied across acres of proton-exchange membrane into enough watts to run my gear. At least in theory.
The collector works like a charm. I know it's not the problem because there's excess ethanol produced every day. What overflows the tiny reservoir gets absorbed by the crapper (which I subsequently consume in melange punch). The fuel cells aren't burning all their inputs, which means that they are the cause of my lack of amps. It seems obvious to me.
But I'm not an expert, and I've jumped to incorrect conclusions before. So I'm building a model, but it's really slow going. The technical specs are larded with terms I've never heard and the theory is worse. The math is making me crazy. Still, it's better lighting this feeble candle than sitting in darkness. Or taking cold showers in a hot hab.
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