On March 18, 2025, it marked an important date in the aerospace industry. That day, astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore said goodbye to the International Space Station (EEI) and finally returned to land after remaining in space more than nine months.
Wilmore and Williams returned aboard a Spacex capsule that aquatized near the coast of Tallahassee. There were thousands who set their eyes on the return of CREW-9.
Meanwhile, in Puerto Rico, space enthusiasts were also pending an experiment created in the Mayagüez University Campus (Rum) of the Puerto Rico University (UPR), which had just been coupled to the US.
What the doctor David Suleiman PinkDirector and Professor of the Department of Chemical Engineering (INQU) of the Rum, did not imagine is that, aboard the capsule aimed at returning to astronauts to the mainland, the Rum Water purification system would also travel, a news that surprised and excited him.
“I couldn’t believe it. They made them (the experiments) immediately. He is already on earth,” he said with great astonishment to The new day.
“I understood that the most important thing about that mission was to rescue those astronauts who took a long time. I saw when the capsule was arriving. I never imagined that my membranes were there with them. One gets excited even more ””he confessed.
1/7 | Spacex capsule aquatizes with the two astronauts that were stranded at the International Space Station. Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who were stranded in the space aquatized healthy and saved on Tuesday afternoon, culminating a long mission that began with a failed Boeing test flight more than nine months ago. – The Associated Press
The technology gestated in the Rum is a water purification system that took off on March 14, at 7:03 pm, As part of the mission “Nasa’s Spacex Crew-10”. The system undertook the trip aboard a dragon capsule of Spacexmanned, which coupled to the US on March 16, at 12:00 am
“The experiment really lasts 12 hours. There are six cartridges and two hours per experiment”he explained, Suleiman Rosado, who was in charge, along with his students, to develop the proposal and technology.
“It is a voestructured polymer membranes system that has as its primary objective to purify and recycle urine. Urine is 97% water, but it has various pollutants that we must remove before taking it again,” he added.
According to the Caribbean Astronomy Society (SAC), purifying and recycling water in space is essential, since, due to its weight, bringing a gallon to space has a cost of between $ 9,000 and $ 83,000.
Five years ago, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) made a call for proposals and, at that time, the teacher and his students began to study the polymers and the possibility of using them to achieve such separation.
However, it was not until the beginning of 2025 that a call arose from Science and Technology Trust which led researchers to submit their proposal and refine the system.
Suleiman Rosado explained that the US currently has a separation system in which a technique called distillation is used, through which the substances are heated and separate by differences in the boiling points.
“It has a system that collects not only human waste, but they collect the water from moisture. All types of water go directly to a system that flows through pipes and eventually reaches this distillation system (…) but this process requires many mechanisms because it also has a pump to make sure this fluid is moving through the pipe, ”he said.
However, although it is the most commonly used separation technique, the doctor assured that it is the one that requires the most energy.
For that reason, Rum researchers chose to develop a simpler technology through which, during the trial period, astronauts should only place the cartridges, which contain nanocomposite membranes, in a system that simulates a pump.
“Everything is contained in the cartridges. The fluids are, the lines are, they are all. They simply put that cartridge in a system like a pump and what it does is that when moving it will move the fluid from one cell to another. There is a membrane cell in the middle and the membrane is the one that will allow only some things to happen and other things do not happen. After two hours, once they turn off and take out the cartridge, given, ”he explained about the operation of the device.
Suleiman Rosado stressed that the intention is to receive the cartridges to study them and see how the membranes system behaved in space.
“We hope everything is exactly the same as what happens on earth Because what we understand is that the transport mechanism (by membranes) is primarily influenced by chemistry and not necessarily by gravity, that is, the lack of buoyant forces in space, ”he said.
For this technology, the Rum team implemented several engineering techniques, such as direct osmosis, a mechanism that allows the separation of urea and water, two molecules difficult to separate.
The professor indicated that, as part of the mission, Rhodium Scientific coordinated the logistics and risk analysis of the experiment.
“In addition to having pure water again, the system would allow us to have all the pollutants on one side, which could be used as fertilizers for plants to obtain food and, at the same time, obtain oxygen, which are the three most important elements we need: Water, oxygen and food to keep us in a sustainable atmosphere ”he concluded.
The professor explained that the cartridges returned to Earth in a container and will be sent to Kennedy Space Center where weight studies will be carried out to have an idea of purification between the cells.
“Then, we ask them to send everything to Mayagüez where we are going to do all the chemical analysis and the analysis of the membranes to see how they behaved in space,” he explained.
How could this technology be used on Earth?
What cells should we create? How do we do it? What is your functionality? These were some questions that pink and doctoral candidate Juan Camilo Rivera Díaz They were made when creating the membranes.
The primary idea is to compare How these membranes behave in microgravity versus how they behave on earth and in natural conditionswhich could give way to its application in different fields, said the professor.
“The reality is that understanding more details of this transport mechanism is useful for so many separations. We make separations of gas and liquid separations,” he said.
“These membranes can be used for things like hemodialysis. There is another type of dialysis that is called peritoneal dialysis, which in one way or another can also benefit, ”he explained.
Similarly, he said that perfecting this technology would also allow it to use it in areas where communities have limited access to drinking water.