| AVS 65th International Symposium & Exhibition | |
| Vacuum Technology Division | Tuesday Sessions |
| Session VT-TuP |
| Session: | Vacuum Technology Division - Poster Session |
| Presenter: | Jong Yeon Lim, Korea Research Institute of Standards and Science, Republic of Korea |
| Authors: | T. Chung, Korea Institute of Civil Engineering and Building Technology, Republic of Korea J.Y. Lim, Korea Research Institute of Standards and Science, Republic of Korea Y. Yoo, Korea Institute of Civil Engineering and Building Technology, Republic of Korea hss. Shin, Korea Institute of Civil Engineering and Building Technology, Republic of Korea |
| Correspondent: | Click to Email |
KICT is designing and building a large thermal vacuum chamber with a simulant regolith test bed inside, named Dirty Thermal Vacuum Chamber (DTVC), capable of performing characteristics evaluation of extraterrestrial exploration drill tools, rovers, and 3D printing tools , as well as investigating the physics and effects of thermal radiation. The DTVC system consists of a D-shape main chamber, φ 4 m x 4 m, and a preliminary chamber of φ4 m x 2 m enabling of preparing and conditioning samples. The extension of the simulant bed to 6 m in length is also possible with opening the gate valve between two chambers for a rover maneuvering test through both chambers.
To successfully establish the DTVC system, a vacuous, cryogenic, and anhydrous (no water) soil environment, simulation of the lunar and Mars surfaces was first proposed with physics requirements of -190 oC ~ 150 oC in the pressure range of 10-4 mbar ~ 10-5 mbar. In order to realize the desired pressure of 5 x 10-8 mbar without any components inside, the baseline exhaust system has been equipped with two 2,000 L/s TMPs and two 28,000 L/s cryopumps as well as one 3,000 m3/h roots pump for roughing and two 300 m3/h dry pumps for backing. The s amples then can be exposed to thermal radiation on the simulant regolith with UHV background vacuum quality.
Since about 25 tons of simulant regolith are necessary for the bed, the regolith outgassing rate of <5 x 10-8 mbar.L/(s.g) is to be strictly regulated to satisfy the physics requirement. For this purpose a smaller scale chamber, called Pilot DTVC, was simultaneously built to realize the outgassing rate of the regolith. An amount of 125 kg of KLS-1, simulant regolith developed by KICT, was pumped down to about 0.1 mbar to remove water content down to <1 x 10-4 mbar.L/(s.g). Previous TDS study of the KLS-1 regolith shows the most content of the regolith ingredient adsorbed is water, and the H2O dose was about 1.2 x 105 mbar.hours during nine month exposure to 50 % RH ambient environment at 300 K average.
This presentation will focus on the brief introduction of the vacuum architecture, and design implementations of the DTVC and Pilot DTVD system for both qualitative and quantitative analyses to satisfy all the strict vacuum requirements.