The human eye has turned itself back to the sky with the commercialisation of the space industry, and a new goal has been set. Setting foot on the Red Planet is the next stage of the human exploration of the universe. The travel to Mars is very lengthy and costly, nonetheless the planet still shows great potential for sustaining human life. To make this a possibility, there is a need for locally sourced energy. The presence of (re-)usable resources on Mars could pave the way to further expand the exploration to an interplanetary scale, and successfully maintain a human presence outside the Earth's atmosphere. The availability of energy will be a key indicator for the success of the human race in the colonisation of Mars. To answer this call for the need to generate locally sourced energy, the design of a renewable energy system was started by a team of students and staff from the faculty of Aerospace Engineering at Delft University of Technology: The Arcadian Renewable Energy System (ARES). The energy system will power the construction and operations of a Mars habitat, to support the livability of humans. The system will use complementary renewable energy sources integrated into a microgrid, to sustainably harvest energy from local Martian environment and resources. To ensure the design will be able to fulfil its purpose, a mission need statement and a project objective statement are generated: Mission Need Statement: To provide renewable energy supply of 10 kW to a Mars habitat. Project Objective Statement: Design a renewable energy supply system, primarily focusing on wind energy, which provides 10kW to a Mars habitat, by 10 students in 10 weeks. Synthesis Exercise (DSE) will last a total of 10 weeks, beginning on the 20th of April, ending on the 2nd of July, with a poster session and symposium. The DSE is in collaboration with the Architectural faculty, where a separate team of students is working on a rhizomatic Mars habitat project as part of an ESA competition, which has an ESA-ESTEC feasibility study proposal incorporated. Due to the multi-disciplinary nature of this project, it is important that the DSE team produces a complete and verified design as the outcome. The Design The design the DSE has come up with consists of two energy production systems, namely the primary and secondary energy system providing wind and solar energy, respectively. In addition the system also consists of a power management and energy storage system.

Floating offshore wind turbines (FOWTs) unlock the potential to harness energy from wind in deeper waters. Despite their potential, the major obstacle to large-scale commercial deployment remains the floating substructure's high cost. Multidisciplinary design, analysis and optimisation techniques are commonly employed to improve their cost-competitiveness, but existing models often use simplified engineering models. This approach risks neglecting design considerations typical of structures subjected to complex aero-hydro-servo-elastic loads. To address the need for incorporating higher-fidelity analysis methods, an optimisation framework is developed, integrating OpenFAST to simulate the response of the FOWT system under various environmental and operational conditions. Leveraging the flexibility of the Python framework and the wealth of output data contained within the OpenFAST simulation results, this holistic approach offers opportunities to explore novel and cost-effective platform designs with high reliability. To demonstrate its effectiveness, the optimisation framework is utilised to achieve a significant reduction of the DeepCWind platform's structural mass. Among the considered constraints, the platform pitch motion was critical, reaching maxima for design load cases characterised by the most extreme wind and waves. Although the inclusion of a structural model for the platform comes at considerable computational expense, it enhances the framework's value, as structural integrity can be verified. The recommended use of the optimisation framework is for in-depth studies, following preliminary design explorations conducted with cheaper models. Future efforts should focus on extending the structural and hydrodynamic model to improve the framework's versatility, and make it applicable to a wider range of platform concepts and turbine sizes.