Sintered or melted regolith for lunar construction: state-of-the-art review and future research directions

Farries, Kevin W.; Visintin, Phillip; Smith, Scott T; Eyk, Philip J. van

doi:10.1016/j.conbuildmat.2021.123627

Cited by 58 publications

(19 citation statements)

References 73 publications

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“…The results indicate for Sample 1 (44.43 g) an average true density of 2.9319 g/cm 3 with a standard deviation of 0.0011 g/cm 3 ; for Sample 2 (8.27 g), the results indicate an average true density of 2.9440 g/cm 3 with a standard deviation of 0.0014 g/cm 3 . The measured volumes are, respectively, 15.1539 ± 0.0056 cm 3 and 12.9994 ± 0.0062 cm 3 . The measures are obtained by repeating the measurement per sample ten times at a temperature of 300.77 K.…”

Section: Density Evaluationmentioning

confidence: 86%

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Planetary Soil Simulant Characterisation: NU-LHT-2M Study Case to Support Oxygen Extraction Lab Tests with a Low-Temperature Carbothermal Process

Zanotti,

Troisi,

Dottori

et al. 2024

Aerospace

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Since the landing on the lunar surface, the lunar regolith has begun to interact in different ways with landed elements, such as the wheels of a rover, astronaut suits, drills, and plants for extracting oxygen or manufacturing objects. Therefore, a strong effort has been required on Earth to fully characterise these kinds of interactions and regolith utilisation methods. This operation can only be performed by using regolith simulants, soils that are reproduced with the Earth’s rocks and minerals to match the real features. This article presents the main guidelines and tests for obtaining the properties of a generic simulant in terms of composition, physical and mechanical properties, solid–fluid interaction, and thermal properties. These parameters are needed for the designing and testing of payloads under development for planned lunar surface missions. The same tests can be performed on lunar, martian, or asteroid simulants/soils, both in laboratory and in situ. A case study is presented on the lunar simulant NU-LHT-2M, representative of the lunar highlands. The tests are performed in the context of an in situ resource utilisation (ISRU) process that aims to extract oxygen from the lunar regolith using a low-temperature carbothermal reduction process, highlighting the main regolith-related criticalities for an in situ demonstrator plant.

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Section: Density Evaluationmentioning

confidence: 86%

“…. [3][4][5][6]. • Chemical reactions such as oxygen and metals extraction techniques [7][8][9][10][11].…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Planetary Soil Simulant Characterisation: NU-LHT-2M Study Case to Support Oxygen Extraction Lab Tests with a Low-Temperature Carbothermal Process

Zanotti,

Troisi,

Dottori

et al. 2024

Aerospace

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“…Structures such as spaceship landing pads and living spaces for humans are required to live on the Moon. Sintered or molten bodies of lunar regoliths can be used as structural materials for building roads and radiation shielding. ,, The composition in lunar regoliths is especially essential for their sintering. The lunar regolith comprises SiO 2 , Al 2 O 3 , CaO, TiO 2 , MgO, and FeO, and the sintered body can be obtained by fusion of the low-melting point components, bonding the regolith particles and solidifying the sintered bodies.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Self-Sufficient Production of Lunar Regolith Gravels on the Moon by Ultrarapid Microwave Sintering

Tsubaki,

Fujii,

Yamamoto

et al. 2024

ACS Omega

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A sintered lunar regolith is expected to be used to construct buildings, roads, and landing pads for spacecrafts on the Moon. Here, we demonstrate that focused microwave heating is effective for the rapid solidification of the lunar regolith simulant to obtain regolith gravel without any microwave susceptor. The conventional multimode microwave oven cannot heat lunar regolith simulants and requires microwave susceptors such as silicon carbide (SiC) and thermal insulators because of its low dielectric loss. We achieved rapid microwave heating of a lunar regolith simulant without using a susceptor or thermal insulator by forming an intense microwave electric field using a cavity resonator and a semiconductor microwave oscillator. Focused microwaves at 2.45 GHz produced the gravel-shaped and solidified lunar regolith at 300 °C lower temperature than a conventional electrical furnace, where more than 1050 °C temperature was required to sinter the lunar regolith simulant. In addition, we produced larger gravel of the lunar regolith simulant using 915 MHz. The intense electric field generated by the single-mode resonator promoted the solidification of the lunar regolith simulant without any additional substances. This process enables the local production of structured lunar regoliths on the Moon without the transport of any materials from the Earth.

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“…To avoid the use of binders, the interest in processes that use the raw lunar regolith increased. Well-known methods are sintering-based additive manufacturing technology [ 42 , 43 ] like high-powered lasers, microwave [ 42 ], or solar sintering [ 44 ]. Other additive manufacturing techniques, such as selective laser melting (SLM) [ 8 , 45 ], mobile selective laser melting (M-SLM) or powder-feed fused deposition modelling (PF-FDM) [ 46 ] have been further examined.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Geotechnical and Shear Behavior of Novel Lunar Regolith Simulants TUBS-M, TUBS-T, and TUBS-I

et al. 2022

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The return to the Moon is an important short-term goal of NASA and other international space agencies. To minimize mission risks, technologies, such as rovers or regolith processing systems, must be developed and tested on Earth using lunar regolith simulants that closely resemble the properties of real lunar soil. So far, no singular lunar simulant can cover the multitude of use cases that lunar regolith involves, and most available materials are poorly characterized. To overcome this major gap, a unique modular system for flexible adaptable novel lunar regolith simulants was developed and chemically characterized in earlier works. To supplement this, the present study provides comprehensive investigations regarding geotechnical properties of the three base regolith simulant systems: TUBS-M, TUBS-T, and TUBS-I. To evaluate the engineering and flow properties of these heterogeneous materials under various conditions, shear tests, particle size analyses, scanning electron microscope observations, and density investigations were conducted. It was shown that small grains <25 µm (lunar dust) are highly compressive and cohesive even at low external stress. They are particularly important as a large amount of fine dust is present in lunar regolith and simulants (x50 = 76.7 to 96.0 µm). Further, ring shear and densification tests revealed correlations with damage mechanisms caused by local stress peaks for grains in the mm range. In addition, an explanation for the occurrence of considerable differences in the literature-based data for particle sizes was established by comparing various measurement procedures. The present study shows detailed geotechnical investigations of novel lunar regolith simulants, which can be used for the development of equipment for future lunar exploration missions and in situ resource utilization under realistic conditions. The results also provide evidence about possible correlations and causes of known soil-induced mission risks that so far have mostly been described phenomenologically.

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Sintered or melted regolith for lunar construction: state-of-the-art review and future research directions

Cited by 58 publications

References 73 publications

Planetary Soil Simulant Characterisation: NU-LHT-2M Study Case to Support Oxygen Extraction Lab Tests with a Low-Temperature Carbothermal Process

Planetary Soil Simulant Characterisation: NU-LHT-2M Study Case to Support Oxygen Extraction Lab Tests with a Low-Temperature Carbothermal Process

Self-Sufficient Production of Lunar Regolith Gravels on the Moon by Ultrarapid Microwave Sintering

Geotechnical and Shear Behavior of Novel Lunar Regolith Simulants TUBS-M, TUBS-T, and TUBS-I

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