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Building on Mars - Master thesis
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The design of Mars Ice House has instigated new spatial and scalable approaches to habitat construction with solid H2O as a primary building material supporting human health and well-being for long-term habitation on the Martian surface. Mars Ice House was the first place winner of NASA's 2015 Centennial Challenge to 3D print a habitat for Mars employing indigenous material resources. Unlike most traditional design concepts making use of Martian regolith, the project makes use of subsurface ice in the construction of a full 3D-printed habitat made out of solid H2O. Citing new evidence of the potential hazards of perchlorates in the Martian soil, and working within NASA's "follow the water" approach towards space exploration, H2O serves as a radiation barrier for the crew while nonetheless allowing light transmittance in the visible spectrum. Mars Ice House was able to demonstrate scaled 3D printing of ice as well as use small-scale robotic technologies capable of building large-scale structures. Next steps for a variety of models of ice habitat construction require continued investigation into the process of water-ice collection and transparent or translucent materials for pressurized enclosures which exploit the manipulation of pressure and temperature to build with ice according to the physics phase change within an interior pressure membrane.
Regolith is abundant on extra-terrestrial surfaces and is the source of many resources such as oxygen, hydrogen, titanium, aluminum, iron, silica and other valuable materials, which can be used to make rocket propellant, consumables for life support, radiation protection barrier shields, landing pads, blast protection berms, roads, habitats and other structures and devices. Recent data from the Moon also indicates that there are substantial deposits of water ice in permanently shadowed crater regions and possibly under an over burden of regolith. The key to being able to use this regolith and acquire the resources, is being able to manipulate it with robotic excavation and hauling machinery that can survive and operate in these very extreme extra-terrestrial surface environments.
Liquid water is a basic ingredient for life as we know it. Therefore, in order to understand the habitability of other planets we must first understand the behavior of water on them. Mars is the most Earth-like planet in the solar system and it has large reservoirs of H2O. Here, we review the current evidence for pure liquid water and brines on Mars, and discuss their implications for future and current missions such as the Mars Science Laboratory.
Neither liquid water nor liquid brines are currently stable on the surface of Mars, but they could be present temporarily in a few areas of the planet. Pure liquid water is unlikely to be present, even temporarily, on the surface of Mars because evaporation into the extremely dry atmosphere would inhibit the formation of the liquid phase, where the temperature and pressure are high enough so that water would neither freeze nor boil. The exception to this is that monolayers of liquid water, referred to as undercooled liquid interfacial water, could exist on most of the Martian surface. In a few places liquid brines could exist temporarily on the surface because they could form at cryogenic temperatures, near ice or frost deposits where sublimation could be inhibited by the presence of nearly saturated air.
Both liquid water and liquid brines might exist in the shallow subsurface because even a thin layer of soil forms an effective barrier against sublimation allowing pure liquid water to form sporadically in a few places, or liquid brines to form over longer periods of time in large portions of the planet. At greater depths, ice deposits could melt where the soil conductivity is low enough to blanket the deeper subsurface effectively. This could cause the formation of aquifers if the deeper soil is sufficiently permeable and an impermeable layer exists below the source of water.
The fact that liquid brines and groundwater are likely to exist on Mars has important implications for geochemistry, glaciology, mineralogy, weathering and the habitability of Mars.
Perchlorate (ClO 4 −) is widespread in Martian soils at concentrations between 0.5 and 1%. At such concentrations, perchlorate could be an important source of oxygen, but it could also become a critical chemical hazard to astronauts. In this paper, we review the dual implications of ClO 4 − on Mars, and propose a biochemical approach for removal of perchlorate from Martian soil that would be energetically cheap, environmentally friendly and could be used to obtain oxygen both for human consumption and to fuel surface operations.
The development of a path-planning algorithm for the robot-assisted rapid prototyping (RP) of ice structures is reported here. The algorithm, written in Matlab code, first imports a stereolithography (STL) file, which contains the geometry of the part to be built, and a text file containing other configuration parameters. The algorithm then finds intersection contours between evenly-spaced horizontal planes and the part; these contours define the boundaries of the areas to be filled for each layer. Each contour is then grouped with the other contours that define the same area. Subsequently, support structure contours are generated automatically from the part model; a support structure CAD model is not required. Then, part and support areas are filled by iteratively shrinking each outer contour until inner boundaries are reached.
Carrying building materials into remote cold regions makes construction in these regions difficult and rather expensive. The need for such materials can be reduced by the use of both ice and ice-soil composites. In cold regions ice is abundant and cheap. However, using ice as a building material has some limitations. It is a relatively weak material and shows an extreme creep behavior compared to conventional building materials; mechanical properties are strongly temperature dependent and melt protection is necessary even in the coldest areas. The behavior of ice can be improved by reinforcement. Ice composites have been applied successfully in engineering structures. In this paper the classification of various methods of ice (-soil) reinforcement is presented. Despite the fact that there are many studies on ice reinforcement, ice composites have a very limited application. At present there are only three types of reinforced ice structures: (i) ice roads reinforced by geomaterials, (ii) watertight elements in the dam of Irelyakh hydro system in Siberia and (iii) ice structures on an inflatable mould constructed in the winters of 2014 and 2015 in Finland. Currently ice reinforcement methods are not widely used in construction. The aim of this paper is to carry out research to further introduce ice reinforcement into the practice of construction when feasible. The authors show that there is a need to stimulate the development of a building method for ice composites.
General principles and perspectives Specimen preparation Tension Compression Shear Flexure Through-thickness testing Interlaminar fracture toughness Impact and damage tolerance Fatigue Environmental testing of organic matrix composites Scaling effects in laminated composites Statistical modelling and testing of data variability Development and use of standard test methods.
This paper considers the strengthening of both frozen soils and the soils after thawing in ice–soil composites generated by the method of cryotropic gel formation. The properties of the frozen soils (ice–soil composites) have to be improved for example in order to create reliable materials with low filtration factor for building weirs and other hydrotechnical constructions, which operate under a wide range of temperatures, including positive temperatures. The application of this method is very promising in terms of the creation of almost impermeable curtains for hydrotechnical structures in cold regions. It is very important that such elements are safe in both frozen and thawing conditions. Aqueous solutions of polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) are used for the formation of cryogels. This paper shows that the ice–soil composites, obtained by using the method of cryotropic gel formation, are sufficiently strong and watertight during thawing. Experimental data are provided.