Novel technologies with limited earth support are required to enable habitation in microgravity spacecraft habitats such as International Space Station (ISS). Disinfection needs is an area of particular need, which is currently accomplished through the use of pre-packaged, disposable, wetted disinfection wipes. These items represent an appreciable carry-along mass and disposal/replacement burden requiring ground support. Therefore, a system is desired that could utilize onboard utilities to create disinfecting solutions to eliminate storage/disposable problems of the wetted wipes and further reduce the astronaut’s dependence on earth-based supplies.

Faraday Technology Inc. is addressing this challenge by demonstrating an in-situ approach, which utilizes on-board supplies of air and water for on demand electrochemical generation of hydrogen peroxide. Hydrogen peroxide is well-established disinfectant with non-toxic decomposition products (viz., O₂ and H₂O), that is safe enough for human contact to be sold commercially as a 1-5 w/w% solution, which makes it an ideal disinfecting solution for closed space environments. Faraday has continued to improve the TRL by scaling the electrochemical peroxide generation system from a sub-scale to alpha-scale process in order to deliver 1 L per day of ~2 w/w% hydrogen peroxide for disinfectant applications from DI water feed-stream with air as a feed source^{[1],[2],[3],[4]}. These electrolytes were then sent to NASA for microbial control property characterization. Specifically, this talk will discuss the results of these advancements.

Acknowledgements: Financial support of NASA Contracts NNX16CA43P, NNX17CJ12C, and 80NSSC20C0070 is acknowledged.

References:

[1] Vijapur, Santosh H., et al. "Electrochemical peroxide generation." ECS Transactions 77.11 (2017): 947.

[2] Vijapur, Santosh, et al. "In-Situ Resource Utilization for Electrochemical Generation of Hydrogen Peroxide for Disinfection." 49th International Conference on Environmental Systems, 2019.

[3] Nelson, George J., et al. "Electrochemistry for Space Life Support." The Electrochemical Society Interface 29.1 (2020): 47.

[4] Vijapur, Santosh, et al. "In-Situ Resource Utilization for Electrochemical Generation of Hydrogen Peroxide for Disinfection." 50th International Conference on Environmental Systems, 2021.