Testing data from hyper-insulated thermal storage system for warm instrument enclosure

This project constructed two prototype 'Hyper-Insulated Instrumentation Systems', an enclosure which synthesizes a number of recent developments in an innovative manner. The intention is to contribute to polar regions scientific research infrastructure by providing a warm, powered environment for an instrumentation payload, with a passive design endurance of 10,000 hours when buried in a shallow snow pit at -60 C. Insulation is provided by a large-capacity metal dewar flask as now used in biotechnology for preserving samples in liquid nitrogen; thermal storage is provided by the latent heat of fusion of 150 liters of specially-formulated paraffin oil; electrical energy is supplied by lithium-ion batteries as recently developed for military applications. The addition of solar panels provides multi-year operation, by recharging the system electrically and thermally during the summer. The system is designed for transportation to remote field sites by helicopter or Twin Otter aircraft, and handling by no more than two people. The system was developed and tested with a two-year-long deployment at South Pole Station in Antarctica. For testing purposes the system was equipped with an array of temperature probes as commonly used for glaciology research, but the system is explicitly designed to be able to accommodate almost any payload package of data-gathering equipment. Students were involved with aspects of the thermal and data-communications design and field testing of the equipment.