Building materials for programs like Artemis can be transported far less frequently if they are used to construct facilities off-world. It seeks to construct an Artemis base camp that incorporates a contemporary lunar cabin, a rover, and a mobile house as part of NASA’s Artemis effort to establish a long-term presence on the moon. A team of UCF researchers just found out that these bricks made of seawater and lunar regolith could be used to build this fixed habitat.
The Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at UCF and Associate Professor Ranajay Ghosh’s research team discovered that lunar regolith bricks can resist the harsh conditions of space and are excellent building materials for extraterrestrial structures. The loose dirt, boulders, and other things that cover the moon’s surface are known as lunar regolith.
Ghosh’s team in the Complex Structures and Mechanics of Solids (COSMOS) Lab combined 3D printing with binder jet technology (BJT), an additive manufacturing process that pumps out a liquid binding agent onto a bed of powder, to construct the bricks. In Ghosh’s research, UCF’s Exolith Lab’s regolith was used as both the powder and the glue.
According to Ghosh, “BJT is specifically suited for ceramic-like materials that are challenging to melt using a laser.” Extraterrestrial manufacturing that is based on regolith has a lot of potential for making parts, components, and building structures.
Green pieces, which were the weak cylindrical bricks produced by the BJT technique, were then baked at high temperatures to create a stronger structure. Bricks that were baked at lesser temperatures fell apart, while those that were exposed to heat up to 1200 degrees Celsius could resist pressures of up to 250 million times that of the Earth’s atmosphere.
According to Ghosh, the breakthrough paves the way for BJT to be used in the manufacture of materials and structures in space. Their research also shows that materials found in space can be used to build structures outside of Earth’s atmosphere. This can make it much easier for missions like Artemis to send fewer building materials.
Ghosh said the use of in-situ extraterrestrial resources versus material transferred from Earth is still a topic of continuing discussion in the space exploration community. In the future, “the more potential we will have to create and grow base camps on the moon, Mars, and other worlds, the farther we develop ways that harness the amount of regolith.”
The paper’s first author is Peter Warren, Ghosh’s graduate research assistant. The paper’s co-authors are Nandhini Raju, a doctoral candidate in mechanical engineering; Hossein Ebrahimi, a doctoral graduate in mechanical engineering; Milos Krsmanovic; and professors of aeronautical engineering Seetha Raghavan and Jayanta Kapat are co-authors.
Ghosh is a researcher with MAE’s Center for Advanced Turbomachinery and Energy Research and joined UCF in 2016 as an assistant professor in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department. He oversees the COSMOS Lab, also known as the Complex Structures and Mechanics of Solids Laboratory, where he and his group create and design new materials with the help of computer simulations and experiments. In 2010, he got the CAREER Award from the U.S. National Science Foundation and his Ph.D. in mechanical and aerospace engineering from Cornell University.
