High temperature sintering evolution of site-specific lunar regolith simulants

The autonomous construction of shelters using in-situ resources, such as via additive manufacturing (3D printing) of regolith feedstock, is a necessary prerequisite and priority to sustain longer duration human presence on the Moon from both a cost and risk perspective. Regolith processing strategies, however, are only as convincing as the simulants used to validate them. We aim to use powder diffraction data to generate the baseline fundamental description of high-fidelity lunar regolith simulants incorporating synthesised glasses and agglutinates, with a particular emphasis on phase evolution during sintering and recrystallization. Liquid presence sintering of matched site-specific compositions is investigated up to 1100°C.