Mankind may still be many years away from making it to Mars, but the list of things that we will be able to do once we get there keeps growing, as a team of Northwestern University researchers has come up with a way to make concrete out of materials native to the Red Planet.
As Engadget and the MIT Technology Review explained, Lin Wan, a chemistry professor in the Northwestern Weinberg College of Arts and Science, and her colleagues devised a method which involves heating sulfur until it melts, mixing it with Martian soil, and then allowing it to cool.
The method would enable astronauts to build permanent structures to replace the temporary ones they would bring with them upon their departure from Earth. Furthermore, their technique would not require the use of any water—which is certain to be in short supply at a new Mars colony.
While Wan’s team has only tested their so-called Martian concrete formula in lab conditions on Earth, their research could go help ensure that the transition to life on the Red Planet is a little bit easier for the first colonists, while also allowing them to lighten their load by limiting the amount of construction materials they need to bring with them when they depart from Earth.
This probably would have made Matt Damon’s life a lot easier
To make the Martian concrete, the Northwestern researchers heated sulfur to about 240 degrees Celsius, which turned it into a liquid. They then mixed it with simulated Martian soil made from primarily silicon dioxide and aluminum oxide, and allowed it to solidify, according to MIT.
As the sulfur cooled, it served to bind the soil-based aggregate to create concrete. They also used particles of various sizes and experimented with different mixtures to find the optimal version of the Martian concrete. Following a series of tests, they concluded that the best mix was 50 percent sulfur and 50 percent Martian soil with a maximum aggregate size of one millimeter.
“The optimal mix developed as Martian Concrete has an unconfined compressive strength of above 50 MPa, which corresponds to a roughly 150 MPa concrete on Mars due to the difference in gravity between Mars and Earth,” Lin and her colleagues wrote. For the sake of comparison, MIT noted that residential building standards on Earth only require concrete with a compressive strength of roughly 20 MPa— indicating that the Martian concrete is strong stuff, indeed.
Furthermore, the study authors noted that their concrete is quick-setting, relatively easy to use, cheap in comparison to materials transported from Earth, and easily be recycled and reused by heating it until the sulfur melts. A paper detailing their research is now available on the arXiv prepublication server.
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Feature Image: NASA
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