Bremen Human Space Exploration Seminar
Guest: Prof. Dr. -Ing. Lucio Colombi Ciacchi
The production of metals on the surface of extraterrestrial planets must necessarily rely on energy sources alternative to the combustion of fossil fuels. Electrowinning is a promising method for the extraction of metals from regolith ores using electricity — a technology that is well suited both to in-situ resource utilization in space and to a solar-powered, fossil-free materials economy on Earth.
In this talk, I will review the benefits and limitations of currently developed electrowinning strategies, with particular emphasis on the use of Littlewood diagrams for the engineering of suitable electrolytes and anode materials.
Littlewood diagrams are thermodynamic maps of electrochemical potential versus oxide-ion activity that define the operating window for electrowinning, especially in molten salts and molten oxides. They can be constructed from knowledge of the free energies of all possible competing phases involved in the process, an information that can be obtained from advanced first-principles calculations, thereby augmenting often limited experimental data.
I will present current results from research conducted within the Bremen Human on Mars Initiative in this field and highlight open research questions and future directions for forthcoming studies.
Prof. Dr. -Ing. Lucio Colombi Ciacchi holds a professorship for Hybrid Materials Interfaces at the University of Bremen, working across the boundaries of materials science, physics, electrochemistry and computational modeling. His work focuses on the atomic-scale understanding of materials for energy conversion, corrosion, and biointerfaces, combining first-principles simulations with experiments. He has coordinated national and European research projects, was the founding speaker of the MAPEX Center for Materials and Processes, and have promoted data-driven materials engineering for space exploration as a new leading theme in Bremen.
Bremen Human Space Exploration Seminar
The seminar will take place every second Thursday at 2 pm CET/CEST at the Center of Applied Space Technology and Microgravity (ZARM) from 2026 during the lecture period.
The invitation for the seminar will be send via email to all registered members of the space-exploration mailing list. You can register for the invitation here.
