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: Permanent structures on the moon could start with something already there: lunar dust. New research from the University of Arkansas shows that pure regolith, the loose material that covers the moon, could be 3D-printed into LEGO-like bricks.
Using it for construction could reduce what NASA needs to send from Earth as it works toward future lunar settlements. The research was published in the journal npj Advanced Manufacturing. Cole McCallum, a U of A undergraduate at the time, was the first author.
Wan Shou, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering, was the senior author. The researchers used a form of 3D printing called laser powder bed fusion. A fine powder is spread across a flat bed, then a high-powered light source such as a laser fuses the powder through a process known as sintering.
The bed is lowered, more powder is applied and the next layer is created. Lunar regolith, unlike soil on Earth, contains no organic matter. It consists of loose, jagged particles created over billions of years as asteroids, micrometeorites and other space debris struck the moon's surface.
For their experiments, the U of A researchers used Lunar Highlands Regolith Simulant (LHS-1), a commercially available material designed to mimic samples collected during the Apollo missions in the 1960s and early 1970s. Other researchers have used binders with lunar regolith to 3D-print objects. But those binding agents would have to be transported from Earth to the moon.
The U of A researchers were the first to demonstrate that lunar regolith simulant could be sintered directly without a binder into reconfigurable building blocks for construction using a relatively low-power light source. "There's nothing else it's binding to. The regolith powder is binding to itself," McCallum said.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
