Restricted Research - Award List, Note/Discussion Page
Fiscal Year: 2023
193 University of North Texas (142081)
Principal Investigator: Bostanci,Huseyin
Total Amount of Contract, Award, or Gift (Annual before 2011): $ 50,000
Exceeds $250,000 (Is it flagged?): No
Start and End Dates: 8/1/22 - 5/31/23
Restricted Research: YES
Academic Discipline: Mechanical Engineering
Department, Center, School, or Institute: College of Engineering
Title of Contract, Award, or Gift: Regenerable Liquid Desiccants for High-Efficiency Humidity Control in Microgravity
Name of Granting or Contracting Agency/Entity:
National Space Grant Foundation
CFDA: 43.003
Program Title: none
Note:
NASA’s challenging deep space exploration missions demand innovative, reliable, and cost-effective technologies to achieve the required human life support systems. Air revitalization in this manner is a key life support system. However, current sorbent-based CO2 removal technologies used in space applications experience reliability issues in the long-term. One of the alternative technologies under consideration is CO2 deposition. Recent NASA studies demonstrated that utilizing cryogenic coolers (such as Stirling cryocoolers) offers cold surfaces for CO2 capture (deposition) and can be an effective approach to revitalize cabin air. However, to maintain purity to feed to a downstream Sabatier reactor, and to ensure high efficiency of CO2 capture, humidity from cabin air must be removed prior to CO2 deposition on cold surfaces. The proposed effort for the M2M X-Hab 2023 Academic Innovation Challenge aims to investigate and demonstrate the feasibility of an innovative humidity control subsystem that can be used for air revitalization in deep space missions. As part of this university-level challenge, a senior design team will perform design, modeling, building, and testing of a prototype subsystem that enables functional studies for NASA’s deep space exploration missions. More specifically, the proposed approach will utilize a unique Vortex Phase Separator (VPS)-based air-desiccant contactor design in a subsystem that can continuously operate, regenerate desiccant, and dehumidify/re-humidify cabin air as part of an alternative spacecraft CO2 removal system. The project will build upon the absorber-desorber systems and leverage the successfully demonstrated vortex style separators to achieve high-efficiency and high-throughput humidity control. The team will first learn about gravity dependent multiphase flow and phase separation technologies, select a regenerable liquid desiccant, and start working on design and modeling of contactors that can be integrated into a CO2 removal system to meet the defined requirements. The team will then build a subscale prototype to demonstrate its capability of continuous dehumidification/re-humidification, and predict performance and scalability of a full-size system. Testing and characterization of the proposed prototypical system will provide much-needed insights for further development of the CO2 deposition system.
Discussion: No discussion notes