Modular Portable Life Support System (PLSS) to Increase EVA Mobility and Reduce Consumables

The main goal of the last few years has been to fully understand the Finite Difference Time Domain Solver, Meep. This understanding involved a lot of background research into non-linear optics and how some of the constants such as the second order non-linear Kerr constant effect the propagation of light in semiconductor materials. Meep has limited documentation and what is out there is not typically geared toward the type of simulations the project needed. This caused a fair amount of trial and error, with each bug or nuance requiring hours and days of research. In order to keep future project workers from running into the same problems, it was decided that a tutorial of Meep should be made. This included all of the background research, purposes, quirks, simulations, and tutorials in both Scheme language (the language that Meep help pages use) and C++ (which I had to learn for this purpose). The tutorial ended up becoming my Master’s project because of the level of work put into it. While I am unable to continue on, someone new can now come onto the project and be brought up to speed very quickly using the tutorial and continue on finding quantitative data to support the end goal of the project. Any further elaboration can be read in the quarterly summaries.