Structural members produced from unrefined lunar regolith, a structural assessment

The potential of utilizing lunar regolith as the raw material for manufacturing structural members is very appealing for future exploration of the Moon. Future lunar missions will depend on in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) for structural components. Manufacturing structural components directly from unrefined lunar regolith would have the advantage of needing less specialized material processing equipment in comparison with refining the lunar regolith for its raw elements. Sintering lunar regolith has been proposed as a structural material by previous researchers but has not been evaluated for its elastic material properties. Sintering can be a highly variable process and only with the knowledge of the material constants can a structure be designed using this material.;Quantification of the material properties was performed for sintered lunar regolith by testing sintered lunar regolith simulant. Two batches of sintered lunar regolith simulant JSC-1A samples with porosities 1.44% and 11.78% underwent compression testing using an Instron series 4500 Universal Test System machine. Material properties were evaluated from the load vs. deflection data acquired. Stress, strain, modulus of elasticity, toughness, the compression strength, bulk modulus, Poisson's ratio and compressive strength were evaluated as a function of porosity and data were aggregated as probability density functions. The average compressive strengths of the low porosity material were 202 MPa, and 84 MPa for the high porosity material. By comparing these values with other ISRU derived structural materials, sintered lunar regolith is expected to be one of the strongest material derived from lunar sources.