High Fidelity, High Volume Agglutinate Manufacturing Process

Up to 65% of the lunar soils are comprised of agglutinates. Although the importance of agglutinate in simulants is often debated, the fact is that agglutinates account for a large portion of the lunar soil and have known effects on final material properties. Increasing the fidelity of terrestrially manufactured simulant can reduce mission risk. Zybek Advanced Products, Inc., is proposing an important innovation to the agglutinate manufacturing process to address mission-critical needs for lunar regolith simulants that achieve NASA's cost and quantity objectives, provide reproducible production processes, and supply required particle size distributions. Additional value is provided to the program by ZAP's unique knowledge of simulant mechanical and material properties gleaned from its production of simulant components for NASA. The majority of ZAP's work completed to date has been focused on high volume, bulk lunar simulant components, including glass, agglutinates and melt breccias. The primary purpose of this SBIR proposal is to innovate the agglutinate manufacturing process to provide significantly higher quality material that will contain nanostructure Fe0. This innovation will leverage ZAP's current investment in the high-volume simulant manufacturing and provide the industry with more accurate simulants that will reduce future mission risks.