Evolution of Regenerable CO2 Removal Technologies for Space

In the new era of commercial and deep space exploration, operators of space habitats need reliable solutions that minimize the total life cycle costs associated with their Air Revitalization Systems (ARS) subsystems. While incremental improvements have been made to decades-old legacy regenerable ARS technologies, they still have inherent limitations including limited scalability and reliability issues, and do not readily lend themselves to closure of the ARS loop. A continuous and contaminant-tolerant next-generation ARS subsystem incorporating Ionic Liquids (ILs) to capture CO2 as well as processes that enable CO2 conversion to recover nearly 100% of O2 are described in this paper. The necessity for closure of the ARS loop for enabling Deep Space Exploration is discussed.