Products Cited in Publications Worldwide Ionic Liquid Property Prediction via Quantitative Structure Property Relationships With Application to Electrochemical Bosch Carbon Formation Catalyst Renewal

Ionic Liquid Property Prediction via Quantitative Structure Property Relationships With Application to Electrochemical Bosch Carbon Formation Catalyst Renewal

Woolever, Mitchell G

Abstract

U.S Space Exploration Policy denotes the critical importance of establishing an outpost on the Moon to provide the foundation for human missions beyond cislunar space via the Artemis campaign. Consumable mass scales with mission duration, and on-demand resupply is not feasible for destinations beyond the moon, so the key to any sustainable presence in space is the concurrent reduction or reuse of process mass effluents and the exploitation of in situresources for metabolic and process consumables replacement. may provide a path for resource extraction and/or recycling. (ILs) are organic salts which are molten at room temperature, demonstrate thermal and electrochemical stability, usually have negligible vapor pressures, and whose application suitability can be directly tuned by selecting from their large host of possible ion combinations and moieties. However, there is a shortage of reported IL thermo-physicochemicaldata in the scientific literature, and reported property values often differ significantly betweenresearchers. Synthesizing and characterizing even a relatively small subset of the multitude of theoretically stable IL anion/cation combinations is time and cost prohibitive. To address this challenge, Quantitative Structure Property Relationships (QSPRs) can be established with a software pipeline that relates IL molecular structure to chemical function. Acidic Ionic Liquids(AILs) show the potential to serve as regenerable digestion agents and for hydrometallurgical applications in space flight such as the renewal of metal catalysts for air revitalization and the enhancement of oxygen and metals production from regolith via digestionand electrolysis. To improve safety, reduce risk / cost, and achieve maximum launch mass advantage, in_x005f_x0002_situ resources should be leveraged for onsite manufacture and replacement of metabolic and process consumables on demand. Thus, a development essential to sustained Lunar occupancy is the capability to extract metals, oxygen, and water from regolith. Technologies such as Carbothermal Reduction (CR) and Molten Regolith Electrolysis (MRE) target the recovery of oxygen from metal silicates in the Lunar regolith and produce a primarily metal silicide slag effluent, which is discarded. ILs may be applicable to the recovery of high-purity metals for in_x005f_x0002_situ manufacturing from this slag or possibly raw regolith. One process essential for human survival is the removal of metabolic carbon dioxidefrom habitat atmospheres. As opposed to competing processes, such as Sabatier, which only achieves ~50% efficient oxygen recovery from carbon dioxide without significant additional effluent processing, the Bosch process can theoretically approach complete recovery, which will minimize life support resupply requirements. However, the metal catalysts required for Bosch are deactivated via carbon build-up during the process and must be periodically resupplied or renewed. As an alternative to catalyst resupply, an aqueous acidic ionic liquid can renew the catalyst as follows: the IL solution digests the metal catalyst from beneath the carbon residue, the metal enters the solution as ions while the carbon remains suspended, the carbon is filtered out of the electrolyte, and the catalyst ions are electrodeposited back onto a conductive substrate. This dissertation presents a method for predicting IL thermophysical properties based solely on their molecular structure, assesses the utility of ILs in hydrometallurgical processes forEnvironmental Control and Life Support Systems (ECLSS) and In Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU), and demonstrates feasibility for the electrochemical renewal of a Bosch carbon formation reaction catalyst via an AIL.

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