Dry-Adhesive Microstructures for Material Handling of Additively Manufactured and Deep-Rolled Metal Surfaces with Reference to Mars

Once on Mars, maintenance and repair will be crucial for humans as supply chains including Earth and Mars will be very complex. Consequently, the raw material available on Mars must be processed and used. Factors such as the energy available for material production play just as important a role as the quality of the material that can be produced and the quality of its surface. To develop and technically implement a process chain that meets the challenge of producing spare parts from oxygen-reduced Mars regolith, this paper addresses the issue of low-energy handling. Expected statistically distributed high roughnesses of sintered regolith analogs are approximated in this work by parameter variation in the PBF-LB/M process. For low-energy handling, a dry-adhesive microstructure is used. Investigations are carried out to determine the extent to which the rough surface resulting from the manufacturing process can be smoothed by deep-rolling in such a way that the microstructure adheres and enables samples to be transported. For the investigated AlSi10Mg samples (12 mm x 12 mm x 10 mm), the surface roughness varies in a wide range from Sa 7.7 mu m to Sa 64 mu m after the additive manufacturing process, and pull-off stresses of up to 6.99 N/cm(2) could be realized after deep-rolling. This represents an increase in pull-off stresses by a factor of 392.94 compared to the pull-off stresses before deep-rolling, enabling the handling of even larger specimens. It is noteworthy that specimens with roughness values that were previously difficult to handle can be treated post-deep-rolling, indicating a potential influence of additional variables that describe roughness or ripples and are associated with the adhesion effect of the microstructure of the dry adhesive.

Automated summary

Maintenance and repair on Mars is crucial due to complex supply chains and the need to process and use raw materials available on Mars. This paper focuses on the challenge of low-energy handling in the development of a process chain for producing spare parts from Mars regolith. Dry-adhesive microstructures and deep-rolling techniques are investigated to smooth the rough surface of additive manufactured samples and enable their transportation. Significant improvements in pull-off stresses are achieved, making it possible to handle larger specimens.