Articles techniques et présentations

In NASA’s Vision for Space Exploration, humans will once again travel beyond the confines of earth’s gravity, this time to remain there for extended periods. Thus all spacecraft systems, including those for the separation of metabolic carbon dioxide and water from a crewed vehicle, must be minimized with respect to mass, power, and volume.

This paper describes efforts to improve on typical packed beds of sorbent pellets by making use of structured sorbents and alternate bed configurations to improve system efficiency and reliability. The development efforts described offer a complimentary approach combining testing of subscale systems and multiphysics computer simulations to characterize the regenerative heating substrates and evaluation of engineered structured sorbent geometries.