Water Release from Shaken Silica Substrates in a Catalytic Reactor

The technological and technical innovations needed to achieve the goal of a long-term presence on the lunar surface are seen as a necessary first step to landing a human mission on Mars. Given the lifting limitations of current rocket technology, this demands innovation to harvest in situ as many of the raw materials as possible for long-term existence in remote extraterrestrial environments. Many catalytic reactions currently engineered for industrial use have relied on gravity conditions on Earth, and make use of phase separation and the diffusion of materials in a liquid or gaseous state within an environment at 1g. Hence, such processes are poorly designed for efficiently producing raw materials in low gravity environments. Additionally, the regolith of the lunar surface is primarily a granular media containing both silica and iron oxides; Mars has a regolith dominated by iron oxide. Water and oxygen are two of the most vital resources that will need to be extracted constantly and efficiently in hostile and low gravity environments. In this paper, we report results of experiments in a 1g environment designed to study the effect of vertical vibration on the extraction of water from a silica oxide substrate. There is a significant effect observed of lowering the temperature at which water is released from the porous substrate in the presence of external agitation. The lower temperature corresponds to less heat energy required to remove water physically adsorbed and possibly release the interstitial water. A better understanding of this result could potentially benefit the efficiency of several catalytic reactions in low gravity environments through the release of interstitial and reactive elements at lower temperatures. The results of this pilot study could have significant repercussions on the remote processing that will be necessary in the lunar environment.