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From simple engineering principles, Allen and Eggers showed that the heat load experienced by an entry vehicle was inversely proportional to the drag coefficient; i.e., the greater the drag, the less the heat load. If the reentry vehicle is made blunt, air cannot "get out of the way" quickly enough, and acts as an air cushion to push the shock ...
Aerodynamic heating is the heating of a solid body produced by its high-speed passage through air. In science and engineering, an understanding of aerodynamic heating is necessary for predicting the behaviour of meteoroids which enter the Earth's atmosphere, to ensure spacecraft safely survive atmospheric reentry, and for the design of high-speed aircraft and missiles.
Reentry capsules are well-suited to high energy reentries. Capsules reenter aft-end first with the occupants lying down, as this is the optimum position for the human body to withstand the g-forces induced as the capsule impacts the atmosphere.
The atmospheric circulation can be viewed as a heat engine driven by the Sun's energy and whose energy sink, ultimately, is the blackness of space. The work produced by that engine causes the motion of the masses of air, and in that process it redistributes the energy absorbed by the Earth's surface near the tropics to the latitudes nearer the ...
The solar updraft tower (SUT) is a design concept for a renewable-energy power plant for generating electricity from low temperature solar heat. Sunshine heats the air beneath a very wide greenhouse-like roofed collector structure surrounding the central base of a very tall chimney tower.
A heat pump is a device that provides heat energy from a source of heat to a destination called a "heat sink". Heat pumps are designed to move thermal energy opposite to the direction of spontaneous heat flow by absorbing heat from a cold space and releasing it to a warmer one.
NASA patented a type of solar-powered Stirling engine on August 3, 1976. It used solar energy to pump water from a river, lake, or stream. [1] The purpose of this apparatus is to “provide a low-cost, low-technology pump having particular utility in irrigation systems employed in underdeveloped arid regions of the earth…[using] the basic principles of the Stirling heat engine“.
Geothermal energy is an enormous, underused heat and power resource that is clean (emits little or no greenhouse gases), reliable (average system availability of 95%), and homegrown (making populations less dependent on oil). [5] The earth absorbs the sun's energy and stores it as heat in the oceans and underground.