Miniaturized Water Recovery System for Advanced Life Support Systems

Makel Engineering Incorporated (MEI) proposes to design, build and demonstrate a prototype unit to significantly improve water recovery for Advanced Life Support System (e.g. International Space Station, Moon and Mars long duration manned missions, etc.). The current ISS Life Support System includes an adsorption based regenerative carbon dioxide removal system, and a water electrolysis system to produce oxygen. The hydrogen from the water electrolysis is vented to space in the life support system such as that which has been developed for Node 3. Carbon dioxide removed from the environment and hydrogen produced as a byproduct of the water electrolysis will be the reactants for our proposed water recovery system. Our proposed system will focus on two major areas of improvement: 1) the miniaturization of the system by use of microchannel reactor technology, and 2) the improvement of water recovery efficiency by the production of ethylene instead of methane. The technology developed for this project can be easily adapted for other Life Support and ISRU applications. In addition, for long term applications, the production of ethylene enables the production of other useful products, such as ethanol, nutrients, and polyethylene for habitat structures, which will increase the cost savings even more.