Human Waste Ultrasonic Dryer Prototype Design, Development, and Testing in Microgravity

To LIVE in space, NASA’s Advanced Habitation Systems is developing capabilities under Life Support and Logistics capability areas that enable future missions. There currently is no fecal water contaminant or recovery available on ISS. Feces is ~75% water by mass and, due to biological activity, generate noxious gases that must be contained, adsorbed, or become an air contaminant burden. The proposed project addresses the main technological gaps associated with human solid waste drying for space applications by developing a functional, hybrid, portable ultrasonic solid waste dryer that uses piezoelectric transducers to extract water from fecal matter inside a membrane bag.

Ultrasonic Technology Solutions (UTS) aims to develop a transformative human solid waste management system for the ISS (also applicable to the moon and Mars) that uses a unique, efficient, and fast direct-contact ultrasonic drying method. For the first time the technology showed the possibility of drying human solid waste in the space applications. Human metabolic solid waste (feces) contains 75% water by mass which is currently not recovered on the ISS. Currently, fecal matter is stored and burned upon reentry. The current method of disposing of fecal waste results in high costs, adds unnecessary payload utilization and is not feasible in long-duration missions. Water recovery and solid waste stabilization are critical technology gaps for long-duration human planetary exploration and future missions to the moon and Mars.

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