Powering up a future moon base
Innovative research into powering a futuristic moon base will be presented by a UNSW undergraduate student at a prestigious space engineering conference in California this week.
“Generating sustainable power efficiently will be one of the largest technological hurdles to future exploration and colonisation of the moon,” says Aaron Bonanno from UNSW’s School of Photovoltaics and Renewable Energy Engineering.
Some of the technologies currently being explored include photovoltaic cells, nuclear energy and fuel cells, he says, but these would requires transporting heavy materials, which is prohibitively expensive.
“Our research is focussed on using as many resources as possible that are readily available in the lunar environment,” he says – something termed In-Situ Resource Utilisation (ISRU).
Solar energy provides an attractive option, but the challenge of ensuring a constant power supply remains, especially given the Moon’s 336-hour long night, during which temperatures plummet to bitter extremes.
Bonanno’s bright idea focussed on storing solar thermal energy – heat collected from the sun that can be converted into electricity – in concrete blocks made from lunar soil, known as regolith.
The problem on Earth is finding a material that can mimic the unique chemical and physical properties of Moon dust. Luckily, the search ended at a nearby quarry on the outskirts of Sydney.
The fine basaltic dust created from the crushing of rocks to make concrete aggregates, is an undesirable by-product, which serves no purpose for builders. It is vacuumed up, bagged and thrown out – or in this case, given away to giddy UNSW researchers.
“It’s like gold,” says Associate Professor Leonhard Bernold from the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. “I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw the large heaps of dust and the large filters over the crushers.”
“This is the closest thing on Earth to moon soil and it's free,” says Bernold. “Before I had to grind basalt for days to get 1 kg of simulant. Now I can have several tons in one truck shipped to our lab."
By “baking” the powdery grey simulant at 1,100 degrees Celsius, Bonanno created solid blocks with exceptional properties for storing thermal energy and showed that a reflective cover could insulate the blocks, allowing them to retain energy throughout the long lunar night.
As a bonus, he also showed the sintered rock dust could be used as building materials for a future moon base, such as lunar landing pads that are strong enough to withstand meteorite impacts, as well as the heat and gas from rocket-propelled vehicles during take-off and landing.
Bonanno’s interdisciplinary research crossed both power and structural engineering, and materials science, and can also be applied to the development of renewable energy systems here on Earth.
He will present his work at the Earth and Space 2012 Conference hosted by the American Society for Civil Engineers, the theme of which is engineering for extreme environments.
More information:
content.asce.org/conferences/e … space2012/index.html
Provided by University of New South Wales
