Issue 12/2020 - Successful preparation of lunar soil-based continuous fibers in China

Recently, researchers from Xinjiang Institute of Physical and Chemical Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences have made progress
in the field of preparing continuous fibers by simulating lunar soil.
They explored the feasibility of lunar soil materials for the preparation of continuous fibers, and prepared lunar soil-based continuous fibers with a tensile strength of more than 1400MPa, which is close to the current commercial basalt fiber materials
.

Taking the demand for high-performance materials in the construction of lunar bases as the starting point, the research team used simulated lunar soil as the main research object, and explored the feasibility
of lunar soil materials for the preparation of continuous fibers by analyzing the composition, structure and thermodynamic behavior of samples.

The results show that the lunar soil and the earth's basalt ore have similar chemical composition, mineral phase composition and similar fiber-forming behavior, and simulate the complete melting of the lunar soil at 1332°C and its transformation into amorphous glass after
quenching.
They also used the melt-traction method to obtain lunar soil-based continuous fibers with a monofilament tensile strength of more than 1400 MPa, which is close to the current commercial earth basalt fiber materials
.

The above results confirm that continuous and controllable diameter fiber materials can be obtained by using lunar soil as raw material, and the obtained fibers are expected to be prepared by lunar soil-based fiber reinforced composites by composite technology, which has important application value
for the construction of lunar bases using lunar soil in situ.