The water treatment and recycling in 105-day bioregenerative life support experiment in the Lunar Palace 1

Xie, Bingyan; Zhu, Guorong; Liu, Bojie; Su, Qiang; Deng, Shengda; Yang, Lige; Liu, Guanghui; Dong, Chen; Wang, Minjuan; Hong, Liu

doi:10.1016/j.actaastro.2017.08.026

Cited by 19 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…Other similar projects are the Biosphere 2 project of NASA, the Closed Ecological Experiment Facility (CEEF) of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), and the Lunar Palace 1 program of the National Natural Science Foundation of China. These facilities were built with a focus on in situ cultivation of higher plants and/or animals for future Lunar or Martian bases (Ashida and Nitta, 1995;Guo et al, 2017;Xie et al, 2017). The Biosphere 2 consists of a 1.27 ha structure of different biomes (marshland, rainforest, savannah, etc.).…”

Section: Bioregenerative Life Support Systems In Historymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The former is populated by bacteria (including nitrifying strains) originating from the Lunar Palace environment and wastewater stream (Xie et al, 2017). It is worth mentioning that this system design was mainly focused on pollutant removal rather than optimization of nutrient recovery.…”

Section: Bioregenerative Life Support Systems In Historymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…More recently, China completed a 106-day terrestrial manned mission in the Lunar Palace 1 facility. A BLSS was successfully used to support a crew of four with minimal external input of food, water, and oxygen for the duration of the trial ( Xie et al, 2017 ; Cheng et al, 2019 ). During the experiment, nitrogen was recovered from urine with an efficiency of 20.5% through reduced-pressure distillation, where ammonia was distilled together with the water vapor.…”

Section: Bioregenerative Life Support Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Development of Nitrogen Recycling Strategies for Bioregenerative Life Support Systems in Space

et al. 2021

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To enable long-distance space travel, the development of a highly efficient and robust system to recover nutrients from waste streams is imperative. The inability of the current physicochemical-based environmental control and life support system (ECLSS) on the ISS to produce food in situ and to recover water and oxygen at high enough efficiencies results in the need for frequent resupply missions from Earth. Therefore, alternative strategies like biologically-based technologies called bioregenerative life support systems (BLSSs) are in development. These systems aim to combine biological and physicochemical processes, which enable in situ water, oxygen, and food production (through the highly efficient recovery of minerals from waste streams). Hence, minimalizing the need for external consumables. One of the BLSS initiatives is the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Micro-Ecological Life Support System Alternative (MELiSSA). It has been designed as a five-compartment bioengineered system able to produce fresh food and oxygen and to recycle water. As such, it could sustain the needs of a human crew for long-term space exploration missions. A prerequisite for the self-sufficient nature of MELiSSA is the highly efficient recovery of valuable minerals from waste streams. The produced nutrients can be used as a fertilizer for food production. In this review, we discuss the need to shift from the ECLSS to a BLSS, provide a summary of past and current BLSS programs and their unique approaches to nitrogen recovery and processing of urine waste streams. In addition, compartment III of the MELiSSA loop, which is responsible for nitrogen recovery, is reviewed in-depth. Finally, past, current, and future related ground and space demonstration and the space-related challenges for this technology are considered.

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Section: Bioregenerative Life Support Systems In Historymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Bioregenerative Life Support Systems In Historymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Bioregenerative Life Support Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Development of Nitrogen Recycling Strategies for Bioregenerative Life Support Systems in Space

et al. 2021

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“…A polymeric UF membrane for removing turbidity together with an RO membrane for surfactant recovery were implemented by Venkatesh and Senthilmurugan (2017) to treat greywater discharged from a washing machine. The In the Lunar Palace 1 in China, a ground-based bioregenerative life support system employing activated carbon adsorption / ultrafiltration, a membrane-biological activated carbon reactor, and reduced pressure distillation technology to purify condensate water, sanitary and kitchen wastewater, and urine, respectively, achieved complete regeneration of water in 105 days (Xie et al, 2017). The purified water condensate was potable, the purified sanitary and kitchen wastewater met the standards for irrigation, 88.12% of the ions from urine were removed, and 20.5% of the nitrogen in urine was recovered.…”

Section: Zou and Hementioning

confidence: 99%

Water Reclamation and Reuse

Sun

Zhang²,

Xu³

et al. 2018

Water Environment Research

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“…A life-support system for manned missions is a set of technologies to regenerate the basic lifesupport elements, i.e., oxygen, potable water, and food during longtime spaceflights, such as in low-Earth orbit, on the Moon, on Mars, or beyond [3]. Life support technologies are also being studied for colonization of the Moon [4] and Mars [5,6].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Resilience evaluation of the environmental control and life support system of a spacecraft for deep space travel

Matelli

Goebel

2018

Acta Astronautica

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In deep space manned travels, the crew life will be totally dependent on the environment control and life support system of the spacecraft. A life-support system for manned missions is a set of technologies to regenerate the basic life-support elements, such as oxygen and water, which makes resilience a paramount feature of this system. The resilience of a complex engineered system is the ability of the system to withstand failures, continue operating and recover from those failures with minimum disruption. Resilient design is a new design framework on which the main goal is to quantify system resilience upfront in order to guide the design team during the conceptual design stage. In this article, we present a tool that combines a rule-based approach with a Monte Carlo-based approach to evaluate the resilience of a proposed environment control and life support system designed for deep space travel. Based on the results found, we explore a few design alternatives in order to increase system resilience.

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The water treatment and recycling in 105-day bioregenerative life support experiment in the Lunar Palace 1

Cited by 19 publications

References 16 publications

Development of Nitrogen Recycling Strategies for Bioregenerative Life Support Systems in Space

Development of Nitrogen Recycling Strategies for Bioregenerative Life Support Systems in Space

Water Reclamation and Reuse

Resilience evaluation of the environmental control and life support system of a spacecraft for deep space travel

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