Development of an Enhanced Brine Dewatering System 2009-01-2486

Water recovery is essential for long-duration space exploration transit and outpost missions. Primary stage wastewater recovery systems partially satisfy this need, and generate concentrated wastewater brines that are unusable without further processing. The Enhanced Brine Dewatering System (EBDS) is being developed to allow nearly complete recovery of water from Lunar Outpost wastewater brines. This paper describes the operation of the EBDS and discusses the development and testing of the major functional materials, components, and subsystems, including the wastewater brine ersatz formulations that are used in subsystem testing. The assembly progress of the EBDS full system prototype is also discussed, as well as plans for testing the prototype hardware.