Nebula Public Library

The knowledge bank of ESA’s R&D programmes

Water Storage System for Lunar Life Support and Exploration

Programme
Discovery
Programme Reference
EISI_11_2021
Start Date
End Date
Status
Closed
Water Storage System for Lunar Life Support and Exploration
Description

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.

Executive summary