Materials for Martian Habitat Application - SpaceLand Design

This thesis has been written thanks to the cooperation between the Politecnico of Turin and the company SpaceLand, in order to design a functional Martian habitat and to present the project to the European Space Agency, ESA. The SpaceLand Martian Habitat design consists of a simple (1/2) dome and involves the use of different materials. The Dyneema® fabric, which characterizes the inflatable structure of the habitat, allows the creation of the so-called “reverse camber”. This configuration makes it possible to inject the designed structural material into the internal layer of the structure and to minimize the loads and the stress on it. In particular, this project aims to define a possible structural material that can be used for the SpaceLand Martian Habitat project. Therefore, an investigation about the Martian soil composition is carried out, with the goal of understanding the presence of some exploitable resources on the planet. Since Mars’s soil composition is not uniformly the same all over the planet, an evaluation of the settlement site for the habitat is presented that takes into consideration the soil’s properties, the availability of water, and the temperature profiles. After these considerations, the thesis focuses on SpaceLand’s Martian Habitat design, presenting both a structural analysis and a thermal analysis of the habitat. Finally, alongside an experimental investigation, an evaluation of the structural material that could be used for this application is shown. Different kinds of concrete have been considered based on different binders: Portland Cement (OPC), Plaster of Paris (PoP), and Sulfur Cement (SC). A definition of the mix design for OPC and PoP was conducted experimentally by implementing the design of experiment (DOE) via the Taguchi Method. The choice of the material used is highly dependent on the payload required from the space mission that will be involved. From the study conducted so far in this thesis, it’s still difficult to determine which material could be more suitable for the SpaceLand habitat, but readers can evaluate the benefits and downsides of each material analyzed. In conclusion, some evaluations about the behaviour and the resulting difficulties of processing fresh concrete on Mars will be presented. Additionally, a probabilistic consideration about possible dangers due to micrometeorites will be presented. And finally, the results of the calculation to estimate the protection capability from Galactic Cosmic Radiations (GCR) of the materials discussed in the thesis are shown.