StarCrete offers high-strength solution for off-world buildings

The new material is claimed to be twice as strong as ordinary concrete and is suited for construction work in extra-terrestrial environments. The team’s findings are detailed in Open Engineering.

In their open access article, the team demonstrated that potato starch can act as a binder when mixed with simulated Mars dust to produce a concrete-like material. When tested, StarCrete had a compressive strength of 72MPa, which is over twice as strong as the 32MPa seen in ordinary concrete. Starcrete made from moon dust demonstrated over 91MPa.

Previously, the same team used astronauts’ blood and urine as a binding agent. The resulting material had a compressive strength of around 40MPa, which is better than normal concrete, but the process had the drawback of requiring blood on a regular basis.

In a statement, research leader Dr Aled Roberts, research fellow at the Future Biomanufacturing Research Hub, said: “Since we will be producing starch as food for astronauts, it made sense to look at that as a binding agent rather than human blood.

“Also, current building technologies still need many years of development and require considerable energy and additional heavy processing equipment which all adds cost and complexity to a mission. StarCrete doesn’t need any of this and so it simplifies the mission and makes it cheaper and more feasible.”

The team calculate that 25Kg of dehydrated potatoes contain enough starch to produce almost half a tonne of StarCrete, which is equivalent to over 213 brick’s worth of material. Additionally, they discovered that magnesium chloride, obtainable from the Martian surface, significantly improved the strength of StarCrete.

The next stages of this project are to translate StarCrete from the lab to application. Dr Roberts and his team have recently launched a start-up company, DeakinBio, which is exploring ways to improve StarCrete so that it could also be used in a terrestrial setting.