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http://www.weberman.on.ca/nvdscience.html]Cool link concerning using nickel vapor deposition using vapor made with the Mond process (carbonyl)
Add boron to the nickel vapor and exact replicas of machine parts, hand tools etc. . . can be formed from a high performance and rather pure metal.
The company tag line: Unique method of mold manufacturing, “atom by atom”.
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One inch thick nickel plate can be deposited in 100 hours!
http://www.weberman.on.ca/nvdbenefits.html]Link - - Use this process to build 8 foot diameter tubes and they should be easily able to contain a breathable PSI. Build habitats from nickel mined on Luna or Mars.
Edited By BWhite on 1113083879
Give someone a sufficient [b][i]why[/i][/b] and they can endure just about any [b][i]how[/i][/b]
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Hmm, interesting. It doesn't say how much energy it takes to operate this machine. Also how strong and wear resistant is a tool/part that is made of pure nickel? Is it similar to aluminum?
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I have been starting to read up. As a liberal arts major its a wee bit harder for me. :;):
Anyway -
Start with nickel carbonyl gas formed by adding CO gas to a ground up Ni-Fe asteroid. [There are plenty of hurdles I will merely skip over and I will simply assume a supply of nickel carbonyl gas! - - I acknowledge major hurdles to obtaining nickel carbonyl gas.]
Nickel carbonyl gas is nasty stuff but if you are on the Moon, its a nasty place to begin with, right?
At 180 degrees C - - yup 180 which is not all that hot - - and at "low pressure" (exact pressure remains out there in google-land) nickel carbonyl gas will deposit pure nickel on a mandrel and release CO for re-use.
Okay, here is my working idea for a lunar nickel vapor deposition device:
Create an aluminum mandrel on Earth. Attach it to a fabric inflatable reaction chamber. Hence low in mass and easily shipped. One side of the mandrel is exposed to allow direct delivery of sunlight.
Deploy the aluminum mandrel on the Moon with the mandrel at the focal point of a solar furnace and the fabric otherwise in shade. Fill with nickel carbonyl gas and allow the nickel to deposit on the mandrel to recover the CO gas.
Heck, I envision making nickel plates maybe 1 meter by 1 meter with interlocking grooves along the edges (like tongue & groove floor tile) and use 1/2 inch nickel plates as a building material. Nickel is easily welded. Assemble the tongue and groove plates and weld for a final seal.
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By the way, M class asteroids with high nickel percentages are also high in platinum! Finding a way to dispose of the nickel before shipping to Earth increases net platinum percentages delivered to Earth.
Edited By BWhite on 1113086947
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http://www.acas.com/news/press_releases … a.html]NVD technology business link
Since nickel carbonyl is a logical product of attempting to mine asteroids or asteroids collected from the lunar surface, NVD technology would seem a natural fit.
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This http://www.finds-space.org/Murali.html]link asserts that Ni(CO)4 forms exclusively at 75 C with a CO pressure of 10 atm. Not too extreme, no?
Since some nickel-iron asteroids are 65% nickel, nickel will practically flow from such resources.
Edited By BWhite on 1113106077
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Nickle is a tough (hardness 4), dense and relativly unreactive. But I'm not sure it is ideal for must uses. Primarily because it is so rare and is overkill for most uses. Even if you are mining asteriods iorn is going to be much more common, and so it makes sense to alloy it with Nickle for most uses and the alloys are supperior in most cases anyways. Nickle is also usefull as a chemicly resistant coating or wear surface coating to plate other metals with. Compared to actulaly refining the stuff this realy isn't that complicated a process (I should know, I do some work in this industry) and can be done in an electroless manner in Nickle's case. In short, nickle is just to valuable to use alone in hand tools and the like. While the simplicity of carbonly deposition is nice, I don't think it justifies using such a (realitivly) scarce resource when some other, more common metal or alloy would suffice.
However, the refining methods you talk about are what the industry curently uses to achive purified nickle, which does speak in its favor.
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
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Nickle is a tough (hardness 4), dense and relativly unreactive. But I'm not sure it is ideal for must uses. Primarily because it is so rare and is overkill for most uses. Even if you are mining asteriods iorn is going to be much more common, and so it makes sense to alloy it with Nickle for most uses and the alloys are supperior in most cases anyways. Nickle is also usefull as a chemicly resistant coating or wear surface coating to plate other metals with. Compared to actulaly refining the stuff this realy isn't that complicated a process (I should know, I do some work in this industry) and can be done in an electroless manner in Nickle's case. In short, nickle is just to valuable to use alone in hand tools and the like. While the simplicity of carbonly deposition is nice, I don't think it justifies using such a (realitivly) scarce resource when some other, more common metal or alloy would suffice.
However, the refining methods you talk about are what the industry curently uses to achive purified nickle, which does speak in its favor.
Dennis Wingo argues in Moonrush that we should mine lunar PGMs which occur ONLY in asteroid remnants. Typical lunar regolith is essentially platinum free.
Asteroid platinum also appears to follow the nickel. The higher the nickel % in a Ni-Fe asteroid the more likely there will be higher PGM concentrations.
Or so I read. :;):
Google thus far more or less confirms Wingo's general argument yet its still not totally proven.
To extract PGM from a Ni-Fe asteroid we MUST digest out the nickel, so we will have it available as nickel carbonyl gas as a FREE by-product of extracting PGMs.
Nickel vapor deposition appears to becoming a well understood process and therefore our ability to fabricate essentially pure nickel products (doping may be useful) - - on the Moon! - - will occur as an essentially FREE! fringe benefit of PGM mining and extraction.
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This may be far less useful on Mars, unless plentiful nickel-iron asteroids are discovered.
As far as the Moon, collecting and smelting Ni-Fe asteroids is the whole idea behind Wingo's Moonrush book.
Edited By BWhite on 1113508940
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It is an interesting concept for manufacturing things in space. If we can couple some of these new processes for manufacturing along with a few things like mining the Aluminum on the Moon and possibly developing ways to also mine carbon asteroids too and develop ways to weave carbon fibers together too for a base material for building something. We could start the process of developing a mining, manufacturing complex on the Moon. Of course it would take awhile to build up a significant large enough infrastructure to do that, but it would give us a game plan for doing it though.
Larry,
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Mars will have as many or more asteroid fragments as the moon will have. Furthermore, on the moon, many will be buried, but Mars has erosion, so there may be old smashed asteroids exposed on the surface that once were a few hundred meters underground. Finally, Mars has abundant carbon dioxide and even has CO in the atmosphere. So Mars may be a better place to use carbonyl deposition and refinement than the moon.
Presumably one can also use the carbonyl process to refine iron. It is not used on the Earth because we have other systems that are cheaper. But it may be cheaper to use the carbonyl process on Martian nickel-iron meteorites to obtain iron than to smelt Martian iron oxide with hydrogen or carbon monoxide gas.
-- RobS
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