| Title: | Experimental investigation of lunar regolith composite powder in selective laser processing & vacuum laser sintering camber design |
| Authors: | Kyunghwan Kim, Author |
| Material Type: | ISU Individual Project |
| Publisher: | Illkirch-Graffenstaden (France) : International Space University, 2022 |
| Size: | 1 electronic resource (40 p.) / col. ill. |
| Bibliography note: | Includes bibliographical references |
| Languages: | English |
| Description: | Due to the extremely high cost of transport from the Earth to the Moon which is around US$ 130k per kilogram(Duke, Blair and Diaz, 2003), in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) is the key for making a sustainable lunar economy. Laser processing (sintering or melting) is the one of the well-known developing technologies in the manufacturing and digital fabrication market on Earth in the range of aerospace, electronics, automotive etc. and even in the biomedical field. Powder formed ceramic materials (use normally Al2O3, ZrO2, or SiC) have been used and studied widely for manufacturing through conventional technology such as gel casting injection molding, tape casting etc., however there is several limitations of the high cost, the usual use of molds, the long processing time for highly complex geometries (Grossin et al., 2021). Laser processing for manufacturing on the Moon with lunar soil, called regolith, has also several disadvantages, for instance, low strength, high porosity, maximum dimension size, high energy consumption, etc., according to previous studies. However, there are advantages of dimensional accuracy, capacity to fabricate varying shapes without molds, and relatively small volume of equipment. Despite of that there might be a delivering issue to the Moon for an additional material (ZrO2 or Polymer) regarding ISRU concept, the introduction of the ceramic components into the powder bed selective laser processing (PBSLP, also known as Selective Laser sintering/Melting) technologies will provides new path for finding solutions to solve such challenges mentioned above. In addition, the number of research of laser processing for manufacturing is relatively smaller than other alternative additive manufacturing technologies, and they were conducted with mare simulant. Since the next human mission on the moon will be in the South Pole, highland simulant LHS-1D was used for this research. This paper investigates first, a brief literature review of the additive manufacturing techniques on the Moon. Second, several experiments with regolith simulant mixing with different ceramic and polymer components are conducted in order to improve the strength of laser processed product and decrease its porosity. After the experiments, products are compared for analysis to find out a suitable composition of materials for future selective laser processing work. Due to the short period of research time and limited accessibility for the facility, this research will be continued in the vacuum chamber in the future at the International Space University. Therefore, a proposal of vacuum laser sintering chamber (VLSC) design is demonstrated at the end of this report. |
| ISU program : | Master of Space Studies |
| Permalink: | https://isulibrary.isunet.edu/index.php?lvl=notice_display&id=11552 |
Read online (1)
 Kim, Kyunghwan_IP (22.3 MB) Portable Network Graphics |
