OXYGEN FROM LUNAR SOIL

ABSTRACT:
Since oxygen is the most abundant element in lunar soil, comprising nearly half of the lunar
regolith by weight, oxygen mined from the moon can play a critical role in about 85% of the
weight of a typical spacecraft at launch is the oxygen used for rocket space industries. Besides
giving us considerable leverage in our development of a space transportation system, lunar
oxygen can become one of the lunar community's most important economic exports.

Here limonite (FeTiO3) is reduced to oxygen. Where more solar heating is used to raise the
temperature above 900 deg C, where the hydrogen will reduce ilmenite into iron, rutile and water
vapor. Gaseous water vapor is pumped on to the electrolysis vessel.

Electrolysis is simply the process of applying electricity to water to cause it to separate into
oxygen and hydrogen

Introduction

One of the most important resources necessary for a human presence on the Moon is oxygen.
The Moon contains abundant amounts of oxygen in its soil, and extraction of oxygen from lunar
soil has been demonstrated in Earth-based facilities using samples returned to Earth by the
Apollo missions. However, the production of oxygen on the Moon using lunar raw materials has
not been demonstrated. Demonstration of oxygen production on the Moon would be a major
stepping stone toward the establishment of a permanent lunar base.

The primary objective of this unmanned mission will be the placement of a small oxygen
production plant on the lunar surface and the subsequent production of oxygen on the surface of
the Moon using lunar soil as the raw materials for the oxygen plant.

Importance of lunar oxygen:

About 85% of the weight of a typical spacecraft at launch is the oxygen used for rocket fuel.
Since oxygen is the most abundant element in lunar soil, comprising nearly half of the lunar
regolith by weight, oxygen mined from the moon can play a critical role in space industries.
Besides giving us considerable leverage in our development of a space transportation system,
lunar oxygen can become one of the lunar community's most important economic exports.

Lunar oxygen, condensed into liquid and stored in tanks made from lunar metals, can be shipped
economically from the moon to refuel spacecraft throughout cislunar space. In fact, one of the
early development goals of the Artemis Project is to provide this refueling service to passenger-
carrying spacecraft in low Earth orbit. That extra fuel load gives a commercial passenger
spacecraft what it needs to fly all the way to the moon, land, and return to low Earth orbit
without need for another refueling. In this scenario, we would refill the oxygen tanks on the
moon before the passenger craft takes off for Earth, delivering another load of oxygen for the
next customer.

Lunar soil Properties:

The significance of acquiring appropriate knowledge of lunar soil properties is great. The
potential for construction of structures, ground transportation networks, and waste disposal
systems, to name a few examples, will depend on real-world experimental data obtained from
testing of lunar soil samples. The load-carrying capability of the soil is an important parameter in
the design of such structures on Earth.

Due to a myriad of meteorite impacts (with velocities in the range of 20 km/s), the lunar surface
is covered with a thin layer of dust, commonly referred to as lunar s. The dust is electrically
charged and sticks to any surface it comes in contact with. Soil is commonly said to become very
dense beneath the top layer of regolith.

Other factors which may affect the properties of lunar soil include large temperature
differentials, the presence of a hard vacuum, and the absence of a significant lunar magnetic field
(thereby allowing charged solar wind particles to continuously hit the surface of the moon). A
weaker gravitational force and the absence of an atmospheric pressure are additional factors
which will affect the design of structures on the surface of the Moon.

Lunar soil Composition:

The lunar regolith is chemically composed of several elements and compounds in varying
concentrations. The carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen found in the soil are almost entirely due to
implantation by the solar winds. Unlike most Earth soils, the lunar soil has high concentrations
of sulfur, iron, magnesium, manganese, calcium, and nickel. Many of these elements are found in
oxides such as FeO, MnO, MgO, etc. Ilmenite (FeTiO3), most common in the mare regions, is
the best source of in situ oxygen.

ELEMENT %Weight
Oxygen 42
Silicon 21
Iron 13
Calcium 8
Aluminum 7
Magnesium 6
Other 3
The relative free energy in Kcal on basis 10000K and 1 atm needed to extract O2 from lunar
oxides is very less for Fe and more for Ca.

The Relative Free Energy Needed to Extract Oxygen From Lunar Oxides

Weathering has left the lunar soil with a relatively fine texture, as illustrated by the grain-size
distribution on soil taken from a mare region

Grain Size (mm) %Weight

10 – 4 1.67
4–2 2.39
2–1 3.20
1 - 0.5 4.01
0.5 - 0.25 7.72
0.25 - 0.15 8.23
0.15 - 0.090 11.51
0.090 - 0.075 4.01
0.075 - 0.045 12.4
0.O45-0.020 18.02
less than 0.020 26.85

Finding Ilmenite:

Moon dust is a mixture of many different minerals, and nearly all of them contain oxygen in
considerable abundance. One of the most common lunar minerals is ilmenite, a mixture of iron,
titanium, and oxygen. (Ilmenite also often contains other metals such as magnesium which we'll
blithely ignore here.)

A critical part of NASA's PILOT (Precursor In-situ Lunar Oxygen Testbed) initiative, this digger
robot will work hand-in-hand with a "processing plant”. Additionally, the blue LIDAR (Light
Detection and Ranging) box atop the three-foot-long machine can assist it in locating "oxygen-
rich lunar soil and autonomously carry it to a processing plant. It will use a bucket-wheel,
cameras and laser rangefinders to scoop up oxygen-rich lunar soil and autonomously carry it to a
processing plant.

Various methods for extracting O2 from lunar soil:

There are at least 20 ways to extract oxygen from lunar material.

Some of methods mentioned below:

1. Most Favored:
a. Ilmenite reduction with H2 (Artemis Project)
b. Molten silicate electrolysis

2. Possible:
a. Ilmenite reduction with C/CO
b. Ilmenite reduction with CH4
c. Reduction with H2S
3. Long shot:
a. Carbochlorination
b. Extraction with F2
c. Magma partial oxidation
d. Plasma reduction of Ilmenite
The Comparison of Ilmenite/H2 with other Processes:

1. Energy Requirement comparison in different processes:

2. Power Consumption and Mass Throughput comparison in different processes:

From these comparisons we understand that anhydrous fluorination requires very low energy but
it produces very mass throughput. Here Ilmenite reduction with H2 requires low energy and
slight excess that compare to anhydrous fluorination but it produces higher mass throughput than
others. Ilmenite/Carbothermal produces high mass throughput than others but it requires very
high energy.

ARTEMIS PROJECT:
Lunar soil is rich in oxides. The most common is silicon dioxide (SiO2), "like beach sand," says
Cardiff. Also plentiful are oxides of calcium (CaO), iron (FeO) and magnesium (MgO). Add up
all the O's: 43% of the mass of lunar soil is oxygen.

The goals of the Artemis Project are:

1. to build a permanent manned base on the moon,

2. to exploit lunar resources for profit,
3. to demonstrate that manned space flight is within the reach of private enterprise, and
4. to bootstrap private industry into manned space flight.

That's it; nothing more.

To accomplish these goals, we want to return a handsome monetary profit to those who invest in
the company, and to those who invest their time and hearts in it, we must return the even more
significant profit of the opportunity to live, work, and play in space.
Everyone participating in the project has personal reasons for wanting this to happen, but the
project as a whole will not adopt any social agenda among its goals. The people who go there
will make of the new worlds what they will. That doesn't mean we shy away from speculating
what those new worlds will be like and what the effects of this project on the future will be.

We're running out of frontiers here on Earth. It's getting crowded; per capita human wealth has
passed the breaking point and is declining. The rest of the universe is out there for the taking if
we can just make that first real step.

Besides those altruistic motives, just about everything associated with the Artemis Project is just
plain fun! People like the toys, the stories, the technical challenges, the fellowship, the sense of
wonder, and even the challenge of trying to create a billion-dollar business out of dust.

Chemistry of the Lunar Oxygen Extraction Process:

To separate ilmenite into its primary constituents, we add hydrogen and heat the mixture. This
produces raw iron, rutile, and water. (Rutile is titanium dioxide, the ore commonly used for
producing titanium metal on Earth. In its crystalline form, rutile is a gemstone. As a powder, it's
the most common white pigment used in paint.) . Further water is separated into H2 and O2 by
using electrolysis process.

The chemical reaction looks like this:

PROCESS DESCRIPTION:

The process starts with regolith-handling robots bringing raw moon dust to the pilot plant. There,
with a system we could design to be the size of a briefcase for the first flight, the pilot plant takes
over.

Once the process is going, the hydrogen we get from electrolysis of water can be recycled and
used for the next load of ilmenite. But to get it started with an initial supply of hydrogen, we
need only heat the raw regolith to about 6000C. That will drive off hydrogen (along with a host
of other interesting gasses, such as helium) that we use to reduce the first load of lunar soil.

The robot dumps the moon soil into a hopper, which filters the dust into the first reaction
chamber. Here we use simple solar reflectors to heat the vessel and drive off the volatile gasses.
Heating the vessel provides the gas pressure we need to move the gasses to the separation unit,
which pumps hydrogen into the hydrogen tank and the rest of the gasses into the next industrial
process down the line.
The regolith and hydrogen are introduced into another chamber where more solar heating is used
to raise the temperature above 9000C, where the hydrogen will reduce ilmenite into iron and
rutile. Gaseous water vapor is pumped on to the electrolysis vessel. If we raise the temperature
above 1,525 deg C, the iron will melt and separate out from the solids, leaving the rutile behind.
The rutile will decompose at 1,6400C before it melts.

oxygen and hydrogen. We use photovoltaic solar cells to generate the electricity. Each of these
gasses will collect at an opposite pole of the electrolysis apparatus. From there the hydrogen is
pumped into the hydrogen storage tank, where in joins other hydrogen extracts directly from the
Electrolysis is simply the process of applying electricity to water to cause it to separate into
regolith in the initial heating process. The oxygen is pumped into a storage tank where it is
condensed into liquid form for use as rocket propellant or introduced into the lunar settlement's
life support system.
ADVANTAGES OF THIS PROCESS:

TiO2 trend market

The conditions of the global economy are a key factor to the TiO 2
industry.
Growth in GDP usually leads to higher TiO2 demand and vice versa. With the strong growth in
global GDP between 2002 and 2004 the TiO2 sector grew from its low of early 2000s to 4.4
million tons in 2004. Overbuying and re-stocking ahead of price rises in 2005 was one
explanation for slower uptake of TiO2. In 2006 and so far in 2007 further price increases have
been observed.
Titanium Production from Ilmenite

There's an interesting side effect to developing this technology for oxygen production. Today on
Earth, most titanium metal is produced from rutile laboriously mined from sands in Florida and
Australia. However, if an efficient process is developed for extracting rutile from ilmenite, we
might serendipitously have an economic effect on the world's titanium production. On Earth,
ilmenite is about fifty times more abundant than rutile; so this research could have a positive
effect on terrestrial production of titanium.
To get pure titanium and more oxygen, we'll have to use a more complex process, perhaps using
a chlorine or flourine reaction; but for the initial pilot plant we have an easier approach. Water is
made of just hydrogen and oxygen, so we can use simple electrolysis to separate the two gasses.

Titanium dioxide does not occur in nature in its pure form, but is derived from ilmenite or
leuxocene ores containing 45 – 65 % TiO2. In addition it can be mined from natural rutile
reserves with commercial typical content of 94 – 96 % TiO 2. So far the rutile production has been
made on rutile beach sand. Hard rock deposits, including Engebø, are also candidates for the
supply chain of the titanium industry. The global rutile production in 2005 was 360,000 tons. By
way of comparison, the global production of ilmenite in 2005 was 4.8 million tons.

CONCLUSION:
This project is useful in synthesis of oxygen on lunar base, so that man can survive on it and
can mine the lunar minerals, which become extinct on earth surface within few decades.
According to Artemis we may see new man base on moon and if possible on mars. this process
also give by product called rutile,which is ore of titanium ,rarely available on earth,

Document By
SANTOSH BHARADWAJ REDDY
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