Cascade Distillation Subsystem Hardware Development for Verification Testing 2007-01-3177

Water recovery from wastewater is essential for the success of long-term missions to the Moon and Mars and human crew operations during explorations of these planets. Honeywell International and the team consisting of Thermodistillation Co. ( Kyiv, Ukraine) and NASA JSC Crew and Thermal Systems Division are developing an efficient wastewater processing subsystem that is based on centrifugal vacuum distillation. This subsystem will be tested at the NASA JSC Advanced Water Recovery Systems Development Facility. The Wastewater Processing Cascade Distillation Subsystem (CDS) utilizes an innovative and proven multi-stage thermodynamic process to produce purified water efficiently, and its rotary centrifugal design provides gas/liquid phase separation and liquid transport (pumping) under microgravity conditions.

Key performance and success criteria for the subsystem design are: water production rate of 5 kg/hr max., specific power consumption at less than ∼140 W/kg, and the successful operation of the technology at NASA-JSC. The system will operate in automatic mode and the control algorithms have been formulated and tested experimentally.

This paper discusses activities for the second year of the program, which include subsystem design, component development, selection and evaluation, subsystem construction, packaging and verification. Challenges and findings gained from experience that will be used for maturing the CDS and any other wastewater processing subsystems for future space exploration missions will also be discussed in this paper.