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Although water quality may currently be analyzed on the ground after a flight, long-duration missions will require the capability to perform analyses on-board. If a water purifier fails, contaminants must be detected rapidly and corrective action taken in a timely manner to prevent serious harm to the crew. Many of the possible contaminants which could negatively affect astronaut health are inorganic ions. These ions can be quantified by ion chromatography (IC), although current commercially-available IC's are too large, heavy, and power-intensive to be used on a space mission. These units also require large quantities of caustic chemicals for analysis, which would pose a significant hazard in a microgravity environment. To meet the need for an inorganic water quality analysis device for long-duration missions, Lynntech developed an ion chromatograph tailored for future planned long-duration missions.

Minimizing or eliminating the requirement for launching, storing and using hazardous solutions to carry out certain analytical procedures (i.e., water quality monitoring) would have a positive impact on in-flight operational efficiency and safety. We have developed a compact reagentless ion analyzer that features: (i) on-demand generation of acid and base from a benign salt solution; (ii) demonstrated the use of an electrochemical cell that operates as a high pressure pump with no moving parts; (iii) combined microengineered fluid management and sample handling through the use of a stackable components fabricated from light weight polymeric materials, and (iv) developed a compact system design that permits parallel processing and analysis of cations and anions. Through use of an electrochemical cell, salts from the waste stream can be efficiently recovered and reused in a cyclic fashion that significantly minimizes resource consumption.

Most monitored impurities in drinking water are inorganic ions for which ion chromatography is the state-of-the-art monitoring method. This technology is unsuitable for spaceflight since it requires reagents and bulky instruments. Regenerative life support instrumentation should be small, consume little power and minimal or no reagents, and be compatible with microgravity. Our reagentless, hand-held ion analyzer analyzes multiple cations and anions, including ammonium and nitrate. This microfluidic ion chromatograph has already demonstrated detection of ammonium ions at 0.5 ppm. In addition, we demonstrated an electrochemical cell used as a motorless high-pressure pump. The stackable components were made of lightweight polymeric materials and designed to minimize the size and weight of the system. We have demonstrated potential solutions for fluid management and sample handling in microengineered formats that have a broad impact.

Practical solar powered aircraft require an efficient energy storage system to store energy during the day for use at night. Hydrogen and oxygen, generated by electrolyzing water during the day and recombined at night to generate electricity, has a theoretical energy density of 3.73 kWh/kg. Harnessing this potential has been approached with a combination of a lightweight PEM electrolyzer and a lightweight PEM fuel cell with a new stack structure utilizing metallurgical bonding to assemble thin metal gas barriers with lightweight metal flow fields. This design minimizes size, weight, electrical resistance, and part count. This technology has been demonstrated to produce efficient and effective stacks.