Status of ISS Water Management and Recovery

Abstract

Water management on ISS is responsible for the provision of water to the crew for drinking water, food preparation, and hygiene, to the Oxygen Generation System (OGS) for oxygen production via electrolysis, to the Waste & Hygiene Compartment (WHC) for flush water, and for experiments on ISS. This paper summarizes water management activities on the ISS US Segment, and provides a status of the performance and issues related to the operation of the Water Processor Assembly (WPA) and Urine Processor Assembly (UPA). This paper summarizes the on-orbit status as of June 2012, and describes the technical challenges encountered and lessons learned over the past year.

Convergent Microbial Community Formation in Replicate Anaerobic Reactors Inoculated from Different Sources and Treating Ersatz Crew Waste

“…Therefore, future manned space operations will require efficient recycling of water and nutrients from organic waste for reincorporation back into food production. Currently, on the International Space Station, fecal waste is collected and stabilized for storage prior to shipment back to Earth for disposal [1]. Urine is collected separately from fecal waste with water recovered by vapor compression distillation and the concomitant production of a nutrient-rich brine [1].…”

“…Currently, on the International Space Station, fecal waste is collected and stabilized for storage prior to shipment back to Earth for disposal [1]. Urine is collected separately from fecal waste with water recovered by vapor compression distillation and the concomitant production of a nutrient-rich brine [1]. In both scenarios, valuable nutrients are not reused, but rather collected for disposal.…”

Omni-Gravity Nanophotonic Heating and Leidenfrost-Driven Water Recovery System

“…Present spacecraft water recovery technologies are susceptible to fouling and failures due to biological and mineral scaling (Carter, 2010;Wong et al, 2010;Carter et al, 2013). Such failures require expensive and time-consuming maintenance and resupply and are thus limited to spacecraft where such resources are available (Pruitt et al, 2015).…”