Terrestrial demonstrator for a low-temperature carbothermal reduction process on lunar regolith simulant: Design and AIV activities

The interest in the Moon exploration and colonization is constantly growing. One of the most critical technologies to be developed to achieve this ambitious goal is the In-Situ Resources Utilisation (ISRU) and extraction. In particular, the water and oxygen extraction from the Lunar Regolith could simplify both manned and unmanned missions, since it can be used for biological purposes or as rocket fuel. To extract oxygen from the regolith, different approaches are under study and development (Schwandt et al., 2012): the most promising are the carbothermal process (Troisi et al., 2022; Gustafson et al., 2010) and the electrochemical reduction (known as FFC Cambridge process (Meurisse et al., 2022)). The paper is focused on the design, manufacturing and testing of the ISRU facility developed at the Department of Aerospace Science and Technologies of the Politecnico di Milano. The plant was realized to demonstrate and validate the carbothermal process for the water extraction from Lunar Regolith simulant, thanks to the activities started under the cap of an ESA study (ESA-E3P-ISRU-SOW-001 -Appendix 1 to AO/1-9183/NL/JK) in a consortium with OHB-I and OHB-S.