Thermophilic consolidated bioprocessing of crew's wastes into biofuels

During highly complex and challenging long-term space mission, one of the challenges is the disposal of waste generated by crew members.  This can limit for travelling time and distance during a space flight mission, or loading weight of a space station.  Several technologies can be applied to process crews’ wastes including incineration, gasification, pyrolysis and oxidation, which are currently under investigation and require high temperature or pressure to generate fuels and other high-value products such as life support oxygen and water.  Thermophilic consolidated bioprocessing (CBP) has been studied for biofuel production from different kinds of wastes, and it can also destroy pathogens during the fermentation process.  In this presentation, high fidelity crew’s waste simulants were converted into biohydrogen using four thermophilic microbial consortia which were developed from water/sediment/soil samples.  The results demonstrated that all consortia produced biohydrogen within 7 days at 60.  When human waste simulants were used as nutrient source, consortia produced maximum 0.823 mmol biohydrogen.  Microbial analyses for all four consortia through Illumina sequencing are currently being carried out.  Long-term goal of the research is to develop a deployable trash to supply gas bioprocessing system based on thermophilic CBP to convert crew’s wastes into propellants or power system fuels.