Using resources found in space to build off-world structures can greatly reduce the need to transport building materials for programs like Artemis. Part of NASA’s Artemis program to establish a long-term presence on the moon, he aims to build an Artemis base camp that includes a modern lunar cabin, a rover, and a mobile home. This fixed habitat could potentially be built with bricks made from lunar regolith and salt water, thanks to a recent discovery by a team of UCF researchers.
Associate Professor Ranajay Ghosh of UCF’s Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and his research group have found that 3D-printed lunar regolith bricks can withstand the extreme environments of space and are a good candidate for engineering projects. cosmic constructs. Lunar regolith is the loose dust, rocks, and materials that cover the surface of the moon.
To create the bricks, Ghosh’s team at the Complex Structures and Solid Mechanics (COSMOS) laboratory used a combination of 3D printing and binder jetting technology (BJT), an additive manufacturing method that forces a liquid binder on a powder bed. In Ghosh’s experiments, the binder was salt water and the powder was regolith made by UCF’s Exolith Lab.
“BJT is particularly suited to ceramic-like materials that are difficult to melt with a laser,” says Ghosh. “Therefore, it has great potential for regolith-based extraterrestrial fabrication in a sustainable way to produce building parts, components and structures.”
The BJT process resulted in weak cylindrical bricks called green pieces which were then fired at high temperatures to produce a stronger structure. Bricks fired at lower temperatures collapsed, but those exposed to heat up to 1200 degrees Celsius were able to withstand pressure up to 250 million times the Earth’s atmosphere.
Ghosh says the work paves the way for BJT to be used in building materials and structures in space. Their findings also demonstrate that off-world structures can be built using resources found in space, which can greatly reduce the need to transport building materials for missions like Artemis.
“This research contributes to the ongoing debate in the space exploration community about finding a balance between the use of extraterrestrial resources in situ and materials transported from Earth,” Ghosh said. “The more we develop techniques that utilize the abundance of regolith, the greater the ability we will have to establish and expand base camps on the moon, Mars, and other planets in the future.”
The first author of the paper is Peter Warren, Ghosh’s graduate research assistant. Co-authors include mechanical engineering PhD candidate Nandhini Raju, former mechanical engineering student Hossein Ebrahimi ’21PhD, mechanical engineering PhD student Milos Krsmanovic, and aerospace engineering professors Seetha Raghavan and Jayanta Kapat.
Ghosh joined UCF in 2016 as an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and is a research fellow at MAE’s Center for Advanced Turbomachinery and Energy Research. He directs the Complex Structures and Solid Mechanics Laboratory, better known as the COSMOS Laboratory, where he and his team fabricate and design new materials using computer models and experiments. He received his Ph.D. in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Cornell University in 2010 and is a recipient of the US National Science Foundation CAREER Award.
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Material provided by University of Central Florida. Original written by Marisa Ramiccio. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
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