As aerospace industries are forced to compete in an environment of declining federal budgets and increased competition, 'design for performance' is quickly giving way to 'design for cost.' Many modern launch vehicle programs are initiated with the goal of lowering the cost of delivering payloads...

Space Solar Power (SSP) is a concept to beam energy from space to terrestrial power grids that could be feasible in about twenty to forty years. Due to the current climate of limited government funding for such large-scale space projects, NASA would prefer more industry involvement (technically...

This paper reports the results of a study that evaluated the economic risk inherent in market variability and the uncertainty of developing weight estimates for an advanced space launch vehicle program. The purpose of this study was to determine the sensitivity of a business case for advanced...

The formulation of the classical basic equations for a thermoelectric cooler from the Thomson relations to the non-linear differential equation with Onsager's reciprocal relations was performed to basically study the Thomson effect in conjunction with the ideal equation. The ideal equation is...

The optimum design of thermoelectric devices (thermoelectric generator and cooler) in connection with heat sinks was developed using dimensional analysis. New dimensionless groups were properly defined to represent important parameters of the thermoelectric devices. Particularly, use of the...