Project Description:

Space habitats will be exposed to many risks, both known and unknown. Building on the control-theoretic view of safety, the RETH institute is developing an approach to design resilient systems and systems-of-systems that are resilient to both foreseen and unforeseen risks. Our approach is grounded in system safety engineering and goes beyond conventional event and component-centric failure models. We model systems from a state-based perspective where the system is in one of four distinct types of states at a given time: nominal, hazardous, safe/recovery, or accident. Safety controls prevent the system from entering or remaining in a hazardous or accident state, or transition the system to a temporary safe state or nominal state. We develop a large safety control option space by identifying a set of generic safety controls. We select safety controls based on their ability to address their targeted hazards as well as their potential to address hazards for which they were not designed. We propose to develop a set of “space habitat resilience” principles that facilitate a priori identification of feasible architectures for consideration in the overall system architecture development such that we identify desirable architectures that (optimally) meet performance, cost, and mass objectives, while being resilient.

Start Date:

January 2023

Postdoc Qualifications:

Background in systems engineering and risk analysis. Familiarity with Fault Diagnosis and Detection and Matlab/Simulink desirable but not required.

Co-Advisors:

Karen Marais, kmarais@purdue.edu, AAE, https://engineering.purdue.edu/VRSS
Ilias Bilionis, ibilion@purdue.edu, ME, https://www.predictivesciencelab.org

Bibliography:

1. SJ Dyke, K Marais, I Bilionis, J Werfel, R Malla, Strategies for the design and operation of resilient extraterrestrial habitats, Sensors and Smart Structures Technologies for Civil, Mechanical, and Aerospace Systems 2021
2. Takaharu Igarashi and Karen Marais, Modeling Extraterrestrial Construction System Failures: Lessons Learned and a Framework Based on Terrestrial Construction, AIAA SCITECH 2022 Forum, January 2022.
3. R Kitching, H Mattingly, D Williams, K Marais, Resilient Space Habitat Design Using Safety Controls, Earth and Space 2021, 992-1003