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It's an old well-known proposal to electrolyze molten oxides, isn't it? There is even hope for wide industrial applications on Earth of such technology for coal
by fuoqi 6y ago
It's an old well-known proposal to electrolyze molten oxides, isn't it? There is even hope for wide industrial applications on Earth of such technology for coal-free metal production. Though I don't see a particular novelty here and it will be quite hard to pull-off on a moon base (after all, you have to work with high-temperatures and the process is quite power hungry), I am happy to see that work continues in this field.
- meowster 6y agoAt least on the moon you won't lose any heat due to convection with an atmosphere. I imagine radiation and conduction heat loses could be minimized.
- fuoqi 6y agoIn space you have a reverse problem: it's difficult to dissipate heat. It's a bit easier to do on moon surface than on an orbital station, but regolith has a limited thermal conductivity, which could be insufficient for an industrial process releasing a lot of waste heat. For obvious reasons we can't simply build wet cooling towers as we usually do on Earth.
- scotty79 6y agoMaybe it's the use of these specific molten salts to dissolve oxides rather than melt them?