NASA considers lunar oxygen production capability to be a major enabling technology for sustaining lunar human presence and pursuing space exploration to other planets. This work combines Carbotek's promising lunar oxygen production reaction technology with Physical Sciences' new high-temperature heat delivery system using solar collectors and fiberoptics to drive the reaction.Carbotek has demonstrated the feasibility of oxygen production form lunar ilmenite by hydrogen reduction through NASA SBIR funding, subsequent reaction studies producing water vapor from Apollo 17 high-ilmenite content basalt, and subsequent KC-135 lunar-gravity flight studies of the behavior of simulant gases and solids in a fluidized reactor suitable for the reaction of lunar ilmenite. Practical operation requires a reactor temperature of 1,000 C or greater.Physical Sciences has demonstrated that an optical waveguide system can provide solar heat to a small fixed-bed reactor at a temperature of approximately 800 C. The innovation proposed modifies this system to heat recycle reactor hydrogen gas by solar-powered optical waveguides to 1,000 C or greater and provides a direct and more efficient method of driving the ilmenite reaction than the alternative of radio-frequency dielectric heating to raise hydrogen temperatures to this level.Physical Sciences' optical waveguide system will be modified and tested to 1,000 C and above. The overall Carbotek reactor/PSI OW system will be modeled; and the preliminary Phase II hot-fluidized reactor prototype design will be completed during Phase I.
Potential Commercial Applications:The chemical and petrochemical industries have a number of process reaction schemes that would benefit by coupling an efficient, direct, high-temperature thermal input with them. Demonstration of a successful optical waveguide system would spur parallel developments for commercial chemical reactor applications. This is particularly true for continuous, short residence-time, small-volume, high-intensity reactions where it is an important safety consideration to minimize the mass of reactants at critical conditions
