| Many of the essential materials needed for the construction of a lunar base can be produced from the resources found on the lunar surface. Processing natural resources on the moon into useful products will reduce the need, and the cost, to bring everything from earth. The lunar regolith has been intensely studied with respect to understanding the formation of the moon and the earth, but as a construction material, the regolith is poorly characterized and poorly understood. To better understand how to "work" with the lunar regolith, four loosely related research projects were conducted. Two projects relate to characterizing and understanding the geotechnical properties of regolith, two projects relate to manipulating and processing granular materials in the lunar environment. The shapes of lunar soil grains are characterized using fractals--results directly and quantitatively describe the rugged re-entrant nature of the large scale structure and the relatively smooth surface texture of lunar soil grains. The nature of lunar soil cohesion is considered using tensile strength measurements of lunar soil simulant. It is likely that mechanical interlocking of irregular grains is the primary cause of lunar soil cohesion. This mechanism is highly sensitive to grain shape, but relatively insensitive to particle packing density. A series of experiments are conducted to try to understand how granular particles might sort by size in a vacuum. Even in a vacuum, fine particles subjected to shear strain segregate by a mechanism called the random fluctuating sieve. The random fluctuating sieve also controls particle motion that determines the structure of wind-blown sand ripples. Hybrid microwave heating was used to sinter large structural bricks from lunar soil simulant. While heating was prone to thermal runaway, microwave heating holds great promise as a simple, direct method of making sintered structural bricks. |
