Author Topic: Outgasing rates relative to pressure  (Read 1018 times)

Offline Rei

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Outgasing rates relative to pressure
« on: 05/30/2016 03:38 pm »
As we know, most common consumer products are not suitable for vacuum exposure; most materials, particularly (but not limited to) plastics tend to outgas in a vacuum, leading to a vapour that can deposit on other surfaces and foul them. The shortened list of materials, and the procedures needed to prevent outgasing, can increase (sometimes significantly) materials costs and require reengineering of otherwise commonly available hardware.

But Mars isn't a vacuum.  And a cargo vessel heading to Mars doesn't have to be one either.

Obviously, the issue is irrelevant concerning areas pressurized for human habitation, since they're obviously "sufficiently earthlike" to prevent outgassing problems.  But how low of a pressure can one get before outgassing starts to become a relevant issue for common materials - your consumer-grade HDPE and epoxy and silicone and all the rest?  Can Martian surface environments provide significant backpressure from the atmosphere alone to avoid it being a problem?  At what altitudes?  What sort of pressures would they need to be stored at in-transit to avoid outgassing problems?  Because the higher pressure you need to have in your cargo vehicle, the heavier it needs to be to withstand the pressure.

Does anyone know of any research / data on this front?  Surely there's ample, but I haven't turned up much so far.

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