One aspect of In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) in a lunar environment is to extract oxygen and other elements from the minerals that make up the lunar regolith. Typical ISRU oxygen production processes include but are not limited to hydrogen reduction, carbothermal and molten oxide electrolysis. All of these processes require the transfer of regolith from a supply hopper into a reactor for chemical reaction processing, and the subsequent extraction of the reacted regolith from the reactor. This paper will discuss recent activities in the NASA ISRU project involved with developing pneumatic conveying methods to achieve lunar regolith simulant transfer under 1-g and 1/6-g gravitational environments. Examples will be given of hardware that has been developed and tested by NASA on reduced gravity flights. Lessons learned and details of pneumatic regolith transfer systems will be examined as well as the relative performance in a 1/6th G environment.


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    Title :

    Pneumatic Regolith Transfer Systems for In Situ Resource Utilization



    Conference:

    12th Biennial International Conference on Engineering, Construction, and Operations in Challenging Environments; and Fourth NASA/ARO/ASCE Workshop on Granular Materials in Lunar and Martian Exploration ; 2010 ; Honolulu, Hawaii, United States


    Published in:

    Publication date :

    2010-03-11




    Type of media :

    Conference paper


    Type of material :

    Electronic Resource


    Language :

    English




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