This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Establishing a long-term presence on the moon will require solving challenges that are easy to overlook on Earth. Lunar temperatures, for instance, can vary from hundreds of degrees below zero to boiling, making effective insulation essential for lunar habitats.
But many materials that excel at slowing heat transfer are not designed to withstand the bumps, compression and repeated handling that would likely come with building and maintaining infrastructure on the moon. Now, engineers at the University of Pennsylvania are exploring a surprisingly simple alternative: stacking hundreds of sheets of Mylar, the same lightweight plastic used as household food wrap and, when coated with aluminum, the shiny emergency blankets handed out after marathons to conserve runners' body heat. In a new paper in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, the team describes a novel way of assembling the film, which they call hybrid layered insulating film stacks (HyLIFS), and which join two properties that rarely co-occur: strong thermal insulation and mechanical durability.
"These stacks of Mylar can bend, withstand substantial compression and maintain their insulating performance," says senior author Igor Bargatin, associate professor in mechanical engineering and applied mechanics (MEAM), "potentially allowing them to be packed, transported and survive rough treatment over many years of use." If the technology can scale from the lab to mass production, the material could prove essential for everything from lunar habitats to spacesuits and other technologies that must operate for long periods of time in the vacuum of space. "The combination of thermal and mechanical robustness is critical for long-term use on the moon," notes first author Danielle R. Levin, a recent Penn doctoral graduate in chemistry, who also received a master's in MEAM.
"This material could open a pathway to inexpensive, durable and reusable lunar insulation." For insulation designed to work in a vacuum, keeping heat from moving through the material is only part of the challenge. Some of today's best-performing insulation materials are extremely fragile. Aerogels, for example, are lightweight materials composed largely of empty space.
That structure makes them excellent insulators of everything from industrial pipelines to NASA's Mars rovers, but can also leave them vulnerable to mechanical damage. Other materials work well until they are compressed or damaged. Multilayer insulation, another technology commonly used in space, relies on reflective films separated by insulating spacers.
It is highly effective at limiting heat transfer from radiation but is not designed to bear significant loads and tears easily when touched. That creates a fundamental trade-off: Making an insulator mechanically stronger can come at the expense of its thermal performance. "For lunar infrastructure, we would ideally like both," says Bargatin.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
