Plastic Melt Waste Compactor Integration and Testing

The Plastic Melt Waste Compactor (PMWC) is a logistical waste management system designed to process select dry and wet waste resulting from humans living in space. Processing functions include compressing the waste into a more manageable tile and recovering water from that waste. The PMWC is a standalone system, capable of operating on its own with external interfaces limited to AC power and a computer. The prototype PMWC was designed and built to test the general design and performance of the processing chamber and of the system as a whole. Development priorities included researching the effectiveness of the chamber surface treatments to mitigate the tile from sticking to the chamber surface, scaling up the chamber size to accommodate a 16-inch square tile, and using a vacuum pump/condenser/hollow-fiber membrane as the primary means to extract water from the chamber. Testing consisted of many trials using various trash waste ersatz models, which allowed performance measurements of the system based on load input. Testing has shown that the system is functional as far as providing compaction, water extraction, and air removal with minimal processing. The primary metric is water extraction performance of which the PMWC showed it can achieve recovery rates greater than 90%; but this metric was also shown to be dependent on trash ersatz packaging method. In summary, the PMWC Phase II Prototype successfully showcased new methods of surface treatments and trash compaction while greatly scaling up over the Phase I version. Future testing on the International Space Station (ISS) would further prove the worthiness of these technologies for manned spaceflight.