Speaker
Description
Sunshading as a geoengineering solution to combat global warming has been proposed as early as the 1920s. This usually involves placing a large disk shaped structure between the sun and earth near the L1 Lagrange point to partially block the incoming solar flux. The size, mass and engineering requirements are immense which motivates research on reducing mass and deployment difficulties by, for example, splitting the shade up into a swarm of smaller ones.
As part of our research at the Advanced Concepts Team, we found out that considering a cone instead of a flat disk, leads to a reduction of up to two order of magnitudes of mass compared to the classical sunshade design, since the cone deflects incoming sunlight instead of simply blocking it.
This poster will show how to find the size, materials and how to deploy traditional and conical sunshades and their effects on global warming. Additionally, we will show how to effectively fold cones via origami patterns to fit more into the same fairing and how to unfold them via centrifugal force alone for easier deployment!