100 colonist production greenhouse

elderflower · 2017-01-08 10:33:11

Yes. All available launches will have preplanned cargo up to capacity. If the life support fails then extra food for one hundred people for maybe two years (which is an awful lot, even dehydrated) will have to be shipped at the expense of planned cargo. So life support by this stage should be fully redundant.

Oldfart1939 · 2017-01-08 11:20:57

Stockpiling enough food for a 100 person colony isn't trivial. Elsewhere, I've pointed out the necessity of ~ 2% of the individual body weight as the daily food requirement. That's for sedentary activity, not doing outside construction or agricultural labor, or the requirement goes up to 2.5% or 3%. Granted, if freeze-dried foods are utilized, which have the ~70% of their moisture removed, the weight required goes down, but only at the expense of hauling a lot more water as cargo. If the foods are in the form of MREs containing water (yuck!), the initial figures remain. I've calculated a generous 5 pounds per colonist per day in these figures; for 3 years stockpile (based on a possible launch disaster during a Hohmann transfer window), that comes to 810,000 pounds of stockpiled food. This brings another topic into sharp relief: FINDING AND DEVELOPING A WATER SUPPLY! As an Army veteran, I can state unequivocally that living 3 years on MREs would be fun. NOT!

Oldfart1939 · 2017-01-08 11:26:12

Spacenut; Iron rations = Canned goods!

SpaceNut · 2017-01-08 11:47:55

That also gives plenty of salt as well....preload stockpile of dry goods for more than 1 mars cycle is a good thing if we had unlimited lift, landing capability and funds. That could be done using ION drive as we could care less about these so long as they get there before we need them.

Lake Matthew Team - Cole · 2017-01-08 12:38:38

Smelt

Spacenut wrote:

...can the same furnace or ovens for metal refining be used for glass?

How to make a useful furnace for metal smelting, glassmaking, etc.?

A blast furnace burning at 1600 C uses roughly 3,000 m3 of methane to make a ton of steel. That would be a heavy draw on an energy-intensive manufactured methane supply.

So might an electric arc furnace be used instead? Normally these furnaces are used only for scrap melt due to conductivity requirement, but perhaps they could be adapted for smelting of protoplanetary unoxidized iron core impact debris. The furnace would need at least 1.5 billion J of electrical energy to make 1 ton of steel. (Not counting other plant energy needs.) Electrical energy is applied to the furnace at a rate of ~60 MW. The quantity of energy seems feasible, but the 60 MW rate is brutal, maybe prohibitive.

Or perhaps a nuclear furnace? What might be the most efficient nuclear furnace designs for smelting, in terms of fuel mass or total plant mass?

Last edited by Lake Matthew Team - Cole (2017-01-08 19:05:06)

elderflower · 2017-01-08 14:24:25

Iron oxide can be reduced to metal using Hydrogen. Same goes for Nickel if necessary.
Rover inspection of metallic meteorites on the Martian surface indicated very little oxidation, so we may not need to reduce oxide ores for quite a long time. I'm supposing that meteorites may be easily located at or near the surface.
Hydrogen can be obtained by electrolysis of water which has been shown to be abundant in parts of Mars subsurface.
We will probably be using Iron and Nickel carbonyls for chemical vapour deposition forming in the early stages of settlement, before we turn to big furnaces with very high temperatures and massive power consumption.
CO will be a by product of Martian atmosphere separation.

Lake Matthew Team - Cole · 2017-01-08 19:31:46

elderflower wrote:

Iron oxide can be reduced to metal using Hydrogen. Same goes for Nickel if necessary.
Rover inspection of metallic meteorites on the Martian surface indicated very little oxidation, so we may not need to reduce oxide ores for quite a long time. I'm supposing that meteorites may be easily located at or near the surface.
Hydrogen can be obtained by electrolysis of water which has been shown to be abundant in parts of Mars subsurface.
We will probably be using Iron and Nickel carbonyls for chemical vapour deposition forming in the early stages of settlement, before we turn to big furnaces with very high temperatures and massive power consumption.
CO will be a by product of Martian atmosphere separation.

Thanks. Well, I can see how the cooler direct reduction process (~1000 C) would use less electrical power than the smelter, but still a lot.

CO is a trace gas, but there are catalytic methods to reduce CO2 to CO, so one way or another efficient CO production should be feasible. Electrolysis is energy-intensive, though. The power needed to produce the H2 from electrolysis might negate the power saving of direct reduction. Or maybe some unassisted photoelectrochemical water splitting method will pan out in future, and slash the energy requirement for H2 production.

Last edited by Lake Matthew Team - Cole (2017-01-08 19:38:02)

SpaceNut · 2017-01-08 20:00:52

I do remember a topic as posted by Void Solar induced hydrocarbon goop on Mars

I will copy your post to it...

The smelting via reduction using hydrogen would also yield water from these oxided metals..I would recycle any metals that we have saved from the trash to help in the process...I also recall using plastic within the stell manufacturing process...
we do have smelting topics here as well which do meantion this....

Iron and Steel on Mars
Question on the iron carbonyl process - Has the iron oxide issue been settled?
Glass
Carbon and Carbon Monoxide

SpaceNut · 2018-06-10 10:47:06

The packaging from the meals can also be recycle to be able to create what we need as well. Have been doing a bit of research into the thermoplastic recycling.
You can ignore the title as there are pdf links within the reading of Use of Recycled Plastics in Cars is Shifting into Overdrive
The different plastics have different recipes, it takes roughly 0.4 gallons of crude oil to make 1 pound of plastic and thats got to come from CO2 and H2O processing which is energy that unless we have unlimited is at a cost to something else.
Lessening the energy required, materials processing, staging of mission materials as a function of reduced of other items of equal need to and abilities to survive does not make sense.

louis · 2018-06-10 19:05:33

The keys to successful food production for 100 people are:

1. Internal artificial light agriculture (requires a significant energy input).

2. Crops with rapid growth and short growing seasons being favoured, and being grown in multi-layered tray systems. Multi-layering can turn a 100 m square facility into a 500 m square facility in effect.

3. Use of hydroponics.

4. Artificial soil/fertiliser/nutrient solution production.

5. Recycling of all human faeces and urine, crop waste and food waste.

Last edited by louis (2018-06-10 19:11:14)

SpaceNut · 2021-04-22 16:57:39

wheat topic

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Re: 100 colonist production greenhouse

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