100-m Scale Tetrahedral Truss Structures Made from LHT-1 Lunar Regolith Simulant Feedstock
Future military and commercial space missions require In Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) and on-orbit manufacturing approaches for building large space structures. Currently, space structures are limited to ~10-m size due to launch vehicle constraints and Earth’s gravitational environment. This paper discusses the use of LHT-1, a high fidelity lunar highlands regolith simulant from the Colorado School of Mines, for demonstrating a methodology for producing 100-m scale tetrahedral truss structures assembled on-orbit. Manufacturing approaches for forming both extruded regolith simulant glass rods and casted node features are presented. The processed regolith simulant material is glasslike and exhibits high stiffness (>70 GPa elastic modulus), high tensile strength (~180 MPa), and a low coefficient of thermal expansion (5.15e-6 [1/K]). Stiffness driven global designs of a 1 Megawatt solar array and 100-m RF aperture are presented with corresponding thermal and structural dynamic simulation models. In the truss fabrication process, extruded LHT-1 glass rods are subsequently welded together into mass efficient, rod-truss struts. Casted LHT-1 glass nodes join truss ends together using a space-qualified vitrimer adhesive. We summarize the complete fabrication process with a global assembly concept of operations. For empirical data, LHT-1 glass rod-truss struts and constituent elements are tested to determine stiffness, compressive strength and buckling knockdown factors for input into the global models. Finally, a sub-length, LHT-1 glass rod-truss is proof loaded to compressive failure to measure the axial stiffness, with >250N strength as a loading goal. The experimentally informed simulation models show feasibility of this manufacturing approach given future advances in on-orbit robotics, on-orbit satellite servicing, commercial lunar base operations, and on-orbit metrology systems.