Regolith Water Loop

Three-stage water pre-treatment column: bioremediated regolith, pyrolysis biochar, and a gravity feed. Bench-built and tested.

Leonardo Salas · rwl.leonardosalas.dev

_{Built and documented in the open by one person. Sponsorship keeps it that way.}

What this is

A habitat has to detoxify its own soil, handle the waste it produces every day, and recycle water. Solved separately those are three problems. Solved together they are one machine, where the furnace that processes waste also keeps the bioreactor warm and fed, and both of them produce the material the filter is made of.

This repository holds the design, the bench build, and the code that measures whether it works.

Stage 2, the filtration column, is the stage built and tested on the bench; see docs/results.md. Stages 1 and 3 are supported by published work. Perchlorate salts are strong oxidisers and are not handled in this project.

Measuring turbidity

Removal is measured from photographs rather than an electronic probe: a phone camera is available and free, a nephelometer is not. A printed target behind the sample loses contrast as suspended solids rise, and a white card in frame cancels exposure differences between shots.

Results are relative to the influent, never reported in NTU.

pip install -e .

rwl measure photos/*.jpg --setup setup.json --out readings.csv
rwl calibrate --readings readings.csv --levels levels.csv --out calibration.json
rwl report --readings readings.csv --calibration calibration.json \
    --before influent --after effluent

Read docs/method.md before shooting a session. The rig has to stay fixed or the series is void.

Sizing

rwl size --crew 6 --base early

Greywater, filter area under Mars gravity, char output and perchlorate stoichiometry for a crew. Every constant is cited in src/rwl/sizing.py.

Development

pip install -e '.[dev]'
pytest

Documentation site

A static site under site/, English at the root and Spanish under /es/.

pnpm install --dir site
pnpm --dir site dev # development
pnpm --dir site build # static export into site/out/

Building the PDF

The whole technical document is assembled from these Markdown files and the SVG drawings with doc-engine-cli. doc-engine.md is the manifest.

pipx install doc-engine-cli
doc-engine build doc-engine.md

Docker

docker compose up site # site on http://localhost:8080
docker compose run --rm rwl --help

Share this project

Share the link directly or scan the code: rwl.leonardosalas.dev

Support

If this is useful to you, sponsorship on GitHub funds the parts, the materials and the time that go into documenting it properly.

License

Licensing is split by what you are using:

• Source code — MIT. Use, modify and build on it freely.
• Documentation, guides and media — CC BY 4.0. Share and adapt with credit.