A Complete Resource Production Flowsheet for Lunar Materials

The lunar regolith must be mined without losing valuable resource (e.g., water sublimation) and beneficiated to remove unwanted or waste material, increase the desired material concentration and to produce a consistent feedstock for further physical and chemical processing that will recover and purify the resource. The processing methods determine the required feedstock properties. This requires an integrated design for the mining, beneficiation and processing value chain, which may allow efficiencies to be made by combining, for example, in-situ extraction instead of mining and beneficiation.

This Topical Team explores all these options by combining expertise in terrestrial mining and mineral processing with lunar materials and resource extraction scientists that are able to collaboratively conceptualise the cross-boundary implications. This is a new approach to ISRU process design.