Rui Ni
Johns Hopkins University
Lunar dust consists of rock pulverized and welded by frequent micrometeoroid impacts, and the resulting agglutinates are sharp and jagged irregular fine particles with unique mechanical and electrostatic properties. Their ubiquitous presence poses challenges to upcoming human lunar exploration and sustainable long-term lunar missions. However, most existing models and methods were formulated strictly for spherical particles with oversimplified geometry and no electrostatic interaction. The key objective of this project is to develop a multi-scale multi-physics framework to model the lunar dust characteristics ranging from microscale physics to macroscale transport in both vacuum and in-cabin conditions. All the models will be validated extensively against several different experiments, including a vacuum drop tower and a shear flow setup. Finally, these tools will be used to evaluate different transport mechanisms and mitigation strategies, which will pave the foundation for upcoming lunar missions.