Continuous, autonomous power.

Generate, store, dispatch.

Energy is the loop the other four run on: when power fails, water treatment stops in minutes, air handling in hours, and food production within days. The Heliphere reference architecture layers storage across three timescales — batteries for seconds to days, thermal stores for hours, hydrogen for weeks to seasons — under Helix's predictive dispatch.

The energy loop as a process chain. Dashed amber lines carry electrical power, solid lines carry mass and heat in the colour of the loop they serve, and dotted lines carry Helix data. Every storage step returns a byproduct — oxygen, pure water, heat — to another loop.

The energy loop in 20ft boxes.

Every energy sub-loop is specified as a standardised 20ft ISO container, designed to dock into the same power, water, thermal and data backplane as every other Heliphere module.

HE-01 · Rev C

Solar Generation

Two full-length accordion stacks line the side walls — 46 leaves each, three ~330 Wp modules per 5.8 × 0.95 m leaf, ~276 modules in all — with the electrical spine down the centre of the box: MPPT combiners, hybrid inverter, Helix control, cable reels, irradiance mast and the deployment drive. On site the wings fold outward through the side walls into a ~100 kWp, ~520 m² array feeding the 380 VDC bus. Two modules make the HELIPHERE ONE field.

Deploys to ~100 kWp · ~520 m² · ~450 kWh/day at 4.5 peak-sun-hours (design target) <0.5 kW parasitic

HE-02

Battery Bank

LFP battery racks with liquid cooling, 250-500 kW power conversion, battery management with per-cell telemetry, fire detection and suppression, HVAC.

~2-3 MWh usable — about a week of core life-support power for twelve crew ~2-10 kW parasitic

HE-03

Hydrogen Plant

250-500 kW PEM electrolyser stack, water deioniser, H₂ dryer and compressor, O₂ capture manifold, safety venting and leak detection.

~5-10 kg H₂/h; the O₂ byproduct covers metabolic oxygen for dozens of crew 250-500 kW at full output — the site's surplus-power sink

HE-04

Fuel Cell & Thermal

100-200 kW PEM fuel-cell genset, product-water capture, plate heat exchangers, stratified hot-water store, hydronic distribution manifold.

100-200 kW continuous plus comparable heat; returns ~9 L pure water per kg H₂ ~5 kW parasitic — net generator

HE-05

Grid Core

Microgrid switchgear, hybrid inverters, solid-state breakers, per-zone smart PDUs, Helix edge node and EMS compute, black-start battery.

Manages a ~1 MW bus across all site containers with quality gates and load shedding ~1-2 kW

HE-06

BioGen Recovery

Anaerobic digester vessels, gas cleanup with H₂S scrubber and dryer, 20-50 kWe biogas CHP genset, exhaust CO₂ capture line to grow zones.

~1-2 kWh(e)/person-day recovered from organic waste — closes the waste-to-power path ~1-3 kW parasitic

HE-07 · Concept · Rev B

TRISO sCO₂ Microreactor

Indirect two-loop design study: an 8 MPa CO₂ primary fluidises a shallow bed of ~250 kg of 1 mm TRISO particles (750 × 450 mm — flow-limited, not heat-transfer-limited, so there is no fixed hot channel) and carries heat through a gyroid intermediate heat exchanger to a 20 MPa recuperated sCO₂ Brayton cycle with CHP offtake. Configuration A fits the 2 350 mm container width with its shield: 3.0 MWth → ~1.15 MWe net plus ~1.1 MWth of 90/60 °C glycol heat to the HSI bus, ~75 % utilisation, ~28 t gross. Decay heat is removed passively in three tiers — thermal inertia gives a day-long grace period, dense CO₂ natural-circulates, and the vessel radiates to a cooled shield liner. Shutdown by four control drums plus gravity-injected B₄C particles. First-order design basis at ±40 %, with a defined verification programme — neutronics, bench tests and CFD-DEM — that carries the concept to a licensable design.

Config A: 3.0 MWth → 1.15 MWe + 1.1 MWth heat · ~28 t shipped Net generator (design study)

A microreactor sized for the box.

HE-07 is Heliphere’s in-house concept for baseload that ignores the weather. The novelty is kept in the core — a fluidised bed of TRISO particles, which has no fixed hot channel — and the design is deliberately conventional everywhere else. Rev B moved to an indirect architecture: a dense 8 MPa CO₂ primary fluidises the bed and carries heat through an intermediate exchanger to a 20 MPa sCO₂ Brayton cycle with heat offtake. Dropping the primary pressure costs four efficiency points and removes a 190 mm creep-limited vessel wall, an over-payload module, activation of the power block, and fines in the recuperator. Everything below is a first-order design basis at ±40 %, ready for the verification programme that follows.

Recommendation: build A, design for B — the same machine with the shield swapped for a site-filled water jacket, worth ~48 % more output where an abnormal load is acceptable.

The same loop, off Earth.

On the Moon, the fourteen-day light cycle inverts the architecture: solar arrays oversize for the day to charge hydrogen for the 354-hour night, fuel cells become the primary night generation, and pre-programmed load shedding at the night transition is a survival function, not an optimisation. On Mars, ~43% insolation and months-long dust storms demote solar to a supplemental role — fission baseload in the Kilopower class, at ~10 kWe per unit, becomes the design-basis primary, with battery and hydrogen reserves sized for a multi-week storm mode driven by atmospheric-opacity sensors. In both environments the electrolyser's oxygen byproduct graduates from useful to life-critical, and thermal management flips from rejecting waste heat to hoarding every watt of it against a cryogenic exterior.

Building energy certainty from first principles.