In-Situ Production of Cementitious Material from Martian Resources, Year 2

NASA is investigating a 3D printing process for structures called additive construction in an effort to make sustainable planetary surface missions economically feasible. Additive construction of infrastructure elements such as habitats, roads, garages, and berms, will require a lot of material, which would be very expensive to launch from Earth. Ideally, the construction material would be mined from materials indigenous to the planetary surface, which would save the cost of launching them from Earth. This project involves extracting a binder material from available planetary resources that, when combined with regolith, will provide a construction material that is compatible with additive construction technologies. The binder currently under study is sodium silicate, also known as water-glass. After combining an aqueous solution of sodium silicate with regolith aggregates, water can be extracted and reused in this process for future building events. This project also employs Ionic Liquids (ILs) as dissolution media; these catalyst-like ILs can be regenerated for further use to process additional regolith for the sodium silicate binder.