Gloucestershire Company wins the prize to invent a way to produce clean water on the moon | The moon

A prize of £ 150,000 for a device capable of producing clean water from the frozen lunar soil was won by a pair of inventors whose solution includes a microwave oven, a motorized device to feed the waste in barbecues and sound waves.

I £ 1.2 million Acqualunare challengeFunded by the International Bilateral Fund of the United Kingdom Space Agency and divided between teams led by the Canadian and led by the United Kingdom, it is designed to encourage innovative solutions to the problem of drinking water production Regolith full of ice-Rocce and powder-around the moon South Pole.

“NASA has set the goal of establishing a permanent crew base on the moon by the end of the decade”, Meganne Christian, a reserve astronaut and a commercial exploration in the United Kingdom said Space Agency that is also president of the Aqualunar Challenge jury. “Astronauts will need a reliable escort of water to drink and cultivate food, as well as oxygen for air and hydrogen for fuel.”

However, extracting water is complicated. Moon temperatures can drop to -173 ° C, there is a low severity and the pressure is so low that the moon can be considered in empty conditions.

Now a small company based in Gloucestershire Called Nickeer Scientific He devised a solution that won the UK’s arm of the challenge.

Lolan Nazerer, technical director of the company, said that the victory was a surprise. “We were against the professors, the largest teams, the teams with access to the full power of university resources of the United Kingdom”.

Two classifiers will also receive prizes: the The team of father and children Redspace Ltd will receive £ 100,000 for their filtering neutralization kit (Frank), while a team from the Queen Mary University in London will receive £ 50,000 for Aqualunarpure, an approach based on the production of supercritical water.

Nickeer said he and his colleague, dr. Ciarán Callaghan, they avoided the brief to start with contaminated ice and instead worked on the basis that this should have been extracted from the lunar regolite.

The result, called Sonochem System, is an agoning in several phases worthy of Wallace and Gromit. The frozen soil is powered in a container similar to a hopper from which it is continuously moved, by means of a cochlea, in a quartz tube that passes through the center of a microwave oven that was shot on one side. There is heated, causing vaporizing the water and various contaminants, leaving the ground behind.

“After the microwave process these sublimated gases, they cannot liquefy because the pressure on the moon is so low,” said Naiker.

The gases are then frozen, before being liquidated under the pressure and subjected to ultrasound that creates millions of micro-bobs in the contaminated water.

“When the pop bubbles, in reality there is a mini explosion that is taking place,” he added, adding the high temperatures and created pressures cause contaminating in the water to evaporate or be divided into other substances that subsequently evaporate, leaving behind clean water.

Nicker said that, in the absence of frozen ground from the moon, the team tested the configuration using a homemade home -made reglite based on the construction of sand, although it did not taste the water produced by the process.

Naiker said he also worked on how to use water to produce propellers for rocket engines. He hopes to use the cash prize to grow his three -year activity and publishes two graduates to help market the technologies that the team has developed.

“I managed to enter into collaborations with two companies interested in a derivative of lunar technology: in one case, a small compact and portable portable water device and, in another case, a effluent treatment device”, added, adding that the team discovered that ultrasound can be used to remove a series of contaminants from the water including pharmaceutical products and fish.