Many commercial processes involve the heating of particulate matter to high temperatures to affect a certain reaction, e.g., Portland cement kilns, drying processes in the agricultural and paper sectors, etc. As energy costs increase and with the focus on limiting green house gas emissions, more emphasis will be placed on improving the overall energy efficiency of such processes. Heat recovery methods using advanced heat exchangers such as the one proposed here could have a tremendous impact to improve this efficiency. The main application area for NASA for the proposed heat exchanger for ISRU plants will be for future missions now being planned to Mars and the Moon, as well as other bodies such as Near Earth objects (NEOs). Long duration missions to the Moon will need substantial amounts of resources for life support and energy. Martian sample return missions and manned missions to Mars may be prohibitively expensive, technically exigent, and unacceptably risky unless resources can be produced on Mars. For example, NASA will need an ISRU propellant production plant on Mars for the sample return mission that it is envisioning in the 2020s.
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