Novel Liquid Membranes for CO2 and H20 Control in EVA Applications, Phase I

The development of new, robust, lightweight systems for CO2 removal during EVA is a crucial need for NASA. With current activity focused on the development of Lunar outposts, mission times will need to be extended without increasing the size and weight of the portable life support system (PLSS). While much of the recent work on the development of new CO2 control strategies has centered on sorbents that can be regenerated during the mission, these system add "on back" hardware, increasing weight and complexity, and reducing reliability. A simpler approach is to use a membrane system to separate CO2 and H2O from the O2 environment. Unfortunately, separating gas phase molecules with the needed selectivity is difficult with standard membrane materials. However, converting CO2 and H2O to compounds with much different properties, could allow the needed separation to be achieved. Therefore in this Phase I project, Reaction Systems will develop a liquid membrane that will have high permeance and selectivity for CO2 and H2O compared to O2, resulting in a TRL = 4. In Phase II we will advance the TRL to 6 by designing and constructing a full scale prototype, which will be delivered it to NASA.

This is a mature technology (TRL 7+) — the realistic path in is usually NASA's Technology Transfer Program: licensing an existing NASA patent, or a Space Act Agreement to use NASA facilities/expertise directly. NASA also runs a startup licensing program with no upfront fee for companies formed to commercialize a specific NASA technology.

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