User talk:Dietzler

Aluminum will be essential on the Moon. We need it for wires, cables, electric motor windings and possibly for vehicles. How to produce it though??? This warrants some discussion. Direct electrolysis in FFC cells to produce oxygen, silicon and calcium (also a good electrical conductor) as well as aluminum looks good. This works at lower temperatures than many other processes but it requires imported FFC cells with non-consumable tin oxide or calcium ruthenate electrodes and calcium chloride electrolyte. Maybe the cost of these imports is worth it? I don't think the Hall-Heroult process is viable on the Moon. Not only would we have to recycle carbon electrodes which to the best of my knowledge burn up in just a few week's time we'd need pitch to bind the carbon and a way to bake the electrodes....also cyrolite has a way of breaking down over time, releasing F vapors, etc. If we use the AlCl3 process the carbon electrodes won't burn up for years but we need LiCl and NaCl for flux....and we have to carbochlorinate the Al2O3 and recover the carbon by shifting it to CH4 and pyrolyzing at 900 C. to get carbon dust which we can use as is and recover hydrogen. This seems to require a lot of heat energy. And we need chlorine which is not plentiful on the Moon. Solar carbothermal reduction of alumina is appealing in its simplicity and it won't require any imported reagents. Carbon could be harvested with Mark 3 volatiles miners and recycled. We could make retorts out of lunar alumina bricks, possibly with some added imported zirconia, and silica for windows and use aluminum sheets or foils for reflectors. Very high temps. (2100-2300C) are involved. There's lots of work being done on solar carbothemic Al production and plenty on the web about this. Somehwere i read that if CH4 is used as the reductant the job can be done at only 1500 C. and the result is Al, CO and H2....It seems this method would be "cheap" given we can make everything on the Moon...but we might make parts of FFC cells too in order to reduce import costs!!! There's really no way to know what costs are gonna be without actual experiments on the Moon. Unless some real smart characters can model everything in computers!!! As for roasting anorthite at up to 2000 C. in solar furnaces to get CaAlO4 and directly electrolyzing that, I have doubts. I wrote about that because i thought that might be the most barbaric thing to do!!!! Perhaps CaAlO4 could be electrolyzed in FFC cells?? Whenever i start talking to engineers about refining regolith they always ask, "Why can't we just roast all that stuff at superhigh temps.?" Getting temps. of 6000 K with solar furnaces might be possible but what could contain such heat??? Pyrolysis of regolith has been experimented with and seems like the simplest most aggressive way to do the job...but the temps. involved make me wary. Until we have an International Lunar Research Park and some experimental data we just won't be able to predict financial costs...and companies want to know what the bottom line is.