3 ms·
Yes, but that's not an issue here. Life support would require a lot of electrical energy, not heat.
by bbojan 5y ago
Yes, but that's not an issue here. Life support would require a lot of electrical energy, not heat.
- mschuster91 5y agoWhat do you need for basic human life support? Light, oxygen generation/CO2 removal, water, and electricity for vehicles and work appliances. Oxygen and water can be stored in tanks sufficient enough to ride out the 14 days dark cycle, LED lighting is extremely efficient (especially if everything is under 9m of moon soil, so no light can escape useless to space), the only thing that may be a problem is CO2 removal - no idea how much energy that uses.
- gpm 5y agoI think CO2 depends heavily on what you're doing with it. You filter CO2 out of the atmopshere using zeolite beds at relatively low temperature/high pressure, you then recharge those by venting the beds at relatively high temperature/low pressure. If you're venting the CO2 to space (they do on the ISS), I don't have numbers/proof to back this up but you probably don't need much energy at all. You just pass air through the absorbing bed at ~1ATM (i.e. with a fan), and a heat exchanger from the venting bed to the absorbing bed might even be enough to keep the temperatures in the right range. If you're capturing the CO2 afterwards however, you probably need some more energy-expensive machinery. Again, I don't have numbers, but you're definitely talking about running a compressor to force the venting CO2 into a tank now, and you might want to compress the absorption side as well to get a bigger pressure gradient. The only real use of that captured CO2 is to recycle it into something useful (e.g. O2 and CH4 using the sabatier reaction), and that reaction is going to be endothermic, but you can probably just store the CO2 until you have sunlight and do it then.