Gale Crater Project by
All of my thermodynamics and fluids coursework culminated in designing an office building on Mars. (Click here to read the full report) The final project of my heat transfer class tasked teams of students with designing the HVAC system for a hypothetical ten-story office building based off the given floor plan. We could place said building wherever we wanted, provided the location had three distinct seasons. California was out.
Assigned Floor Plan
As a joke, a teammate emailed the professor asking if we could place our building on Mars. She claimed that the temperature difference between daytime and nighttime was so great as to render them effectively different seasons. The third season would come from the conditions a Martian sandstorms creates. We could minimize noise from actual seasonal variation on Mars by placing our hypothetical building on the equator. Surprisingly, the professor found the argument very convincing and gave us the go ahead. For the record, I voted for Chicago.
Placing the building on Mars raised unique challenges. We could not get power from an electrical grid, nor could we get water from the municipal water supply. Naturally, we could not count on atmospheric oxygen for breathing. We had to develop our own life support system.
The professor granted us some leeway by allowing us assume we were operating around 100 years in the future. This time horizon gave us access to technologies currently in development by organizations such as NASA. We operated off of the admittedly dubious premise that all projects would be completed on time and would meet all of their intended goals, but this presumption was a necessary evil.
Flowchart of Life Support Plan: made by Mikaela Juzswik using Adobe Illustrator
One key part of this project was to make the HVAC system as economical as possible. For other teams, that mandate meant looking at commercially available equipment and trying to optimize based on unit cost, lifespan, and efficacy. Generating some power locally would, for example, allow for a lower heating bill by using waste heat from the generator to heat the building. The unit cost of electricity from locally generated power, however, might be so much higher than that of grid power that the increased costs dwarf any money saved. In addition, the purchase and maintenance costs of the generators needed to be taken into account.
Our economic analysis was easier in some respects. The rocket equation means that it currently costs about $20,000 to put one kilogram into low Earth orbit. Even when using the highly optimistic number of about $5,350 per kilogram of payload that SpaceX quotes as the price for its Falcon Heavy, the vast majority of the cost of any piece of equipment will be sending it there. This price tag meant that we did not need to focus on the actual cost of anything. Instead, we just looked for or designed the lightest piece of equipment that would work.
The HVAC, power, and life support system for this hypothetical building on Mars would cost approximately $6.3 billion. That price does not even include the cost of building the rest of the structure. Few people have that kind of money burning a hole in their pocket, so we developed an aggressive loan plan to ensure that we had the capital necessary to keep everyone alive over the 25 year life of the plan. See section 4.8.3 if you are interested.
I would not recommend building a traditional office building on Mars. It is difficult, expensive, and pretty much impossible for the foreseeable future. Despite the infeasibility of completing such a project, the process of creating this report was highly educational. The research was interesting, and I was able to use concepts from multiple courses in a real-world application.
More importantly, I practiced skills that will be useful throughout my career. From overcoming atypical challenges though lateral thinking to applying knowledge to scenarios seemingly unrelated to the ones it was initially intended for, I learned how to cobble together pieces of information from various sources into one coherent approach. Placing the building on Mars was not my first—or tenth—choice. Even so, I threw myself wholeheartedly into the project once that choice was made. Situations will come up where I might not agree with a decision, but once it is made it will be my job to make it happen. I proved I can do that.
Teammates on this project were Jing Gu, Mikaela Juzswik, Saad Yousaf, and Clark Zha