Water Recovery and Production System Automated Sizing Tool Application for life-support in harsh environments

The main purpose of this work is to develop the first version of an automated tool, that is capable of defining the functional architecture and sizing a water recovery and production system based on a user input set. The work was carried on in collaboration with Thales Alenia Space in Italy at the Turin company site, which is strongly involved in space exploration related technological developments. The software is intended to help the user to estimate resources needed to support a small crew to live in a harsh environment. Starting from Thales Alenia Space know-how in the life support system for astronauts on ISS, the focus is concentrated on exploration scenario for the Oil&Gas industry. In fact, it is characterized by small-crew missions (5-15 people) and duration range between a few weeks up to several months. For remote area, lack of infrastructure can represent an impediment against feasibility, due to the huge cost of periodical refurbishment. The direction is to design habitats as self-sustainable as possible, retrieving water from the environment or reducing the load of clean water applying greywater recycling. This work describes in detail potable water provision aspects taken into account by the World Health Organization to properly establish a guideline to control water quality, in terms of safety against health concerns and acceptability for drinking purpose: - the microbial aspect focuses on harmful microorganisms that can be found in water, representing the cause of disease and, in some cases, they lead to outbreaks; - the chemical aspect gathers information about species in natural water or contaminant deriving from human activities, that constitutes over certain concentration, a treat for consumers’ safety; - the acceptability aspect takes into account not-health-related characteristics that consumers will check on deciding about water drinkability. The last section of the chapter gathers information about principal possible water sources and related threats to be faced. The state of art describes technologies, among the existing ones, considered to build functional blocks of the water recovery production system. They represent the most common solutions that can be found as commercial-off-the-shelf components used on water production systems. For each type of component is highlighted its main purpose, the principle of operation, and drawbacks: - granulated activated carbon components face principally aspect related to acceptability aspect and minor chemical issues; - membrane filtration, at a different level depending on technology, ensure water quality principally on the chemical aspect, filtering suspended solids and dissolved molecules; - a disinfection step is responsible to eliminate any hazard related to microbial water load. In the last chapter, a close up is done on the developed software. A description of the input section is provided, showing all possible options proposed to the user, and coefficient related to water consumption estimation. On the system architecture section, a brief presentation of custom configuration typology is shown. In addition, details concerning database filling and design assumption are provided. The software will provide numerical output regarding volume occupation of the system, overall clean water demand and suggested sizing for storage and wastewater tanks.