Water Storage System for Lunar Life Support and Exploration

A system is researched and developed to store water in its liquid state at temperatures below the freezing point using a passive unfreezing method. This is achieved by mixing it with phytantriol, a commercially available non-toxic, non-volatile, non-corrosive, non-inflammable lipid. Both, the scale up of the enrichment process from laboratory scales, and the separation of water from phytantriol, are demonstrated experimentally. In addition, various material properties are measured, an architecture is proposed, and a numerical model is developed to obtain first estimates of the power consumption of a system of this type.