Targeted mineral beneficiation of lunar regolith: Feasibility assessment and next steps

Kurzfassung

As the global space industry is gearing towards long term space exploration missions, the in-situ resources available in space become important parameters that will influence the feasibility and sustainability of these missions. Moon is one of the primary locations for near future technology demonstration and validation missions. Most of the lunar surface is covered with lunar regolith, that has various necessary resources such as oxygen, iron, titanium, aluminium, silicon, etc. embedded within the constituent minerals. These resources can serve as in-situ raw materials for applications such as producing propellants, consumables for life support systems, manufacturing glass and more. However, these applications rely on specific regolith properties that directly affect their efficiency. As a result, beneficiation of the excavated regolith is essential to produce the feedstocks with the desired characteristics to achieve high system performance. Most beneficiation studies so far primarily focus on enrichment of specific minerals, often leaving a significant portion of the regolith as unclassified dust with unknown properties. The goal of this research is to study the behavior of all rock-forming minerals in lunar regolith by implementing different beneficiation methods and assess the feasibility of their selective enrichment. The research aims to combine theoretical and experimental approaches for the feasibility assessment. The theoretical analysis, comprising of existing beneficiation knowledge, lunar regolith characteristics and the properties of individual rocks and minerals, aims to provide a framework for the experimental analysis. The experimental analysis comprises a multitude of experiments conducted on lunar regolith simulants with further characterization of samples using X-ray Diffractometry (XRD) to compare the concentrations of minerals in beneficiated samples across a range of process parameters. The research confirms the possibility of targeted mineral beneficiation with a potential for process optimization to further improve the system performance.