PB2B

Part 1: Two Scholarly Articles

[1] R. Shi, F. Zhang and Z. Zhang, "Recycling oxygen from spaceflight solid waste for life support system: Potential of pyrolysis process," Chemical Engineering Journal, vol. 334, pp. 479-486, 2018.

[2] S. Deng, B. Xie and H. Liu, "The recycle of water and nitrogen from urine in bioregenerative life support system," Acta Astronautica, vol. 123, pp. 86-90, 2016.




Part 2: Content

Both articles focused on life support systems that could be used for manned space missions. The first article focused more on the aspect of recycling oxygen from solid waste, while the second article focused more on the recycling of water from water waste. Both articles researched and studied the concepts in very similar ways. They both conducted experiments where they actually recycled waste in oxygen gas and water. In the first article they would expose the waste to high temperatures, anywhere from 400 to 800 degrees celcius, and this would leave them with 3 different products. They were left with a charred solid that contained between 7 to 10 percent oxygen, a liquid that contained 30 to 50 percent oxygen, and a gas that contained 50 to 60 percent oxygen. The yield of oxygen changed based on the temperature that the waste was exposed to. In the second article they used a combination of hydrolysis and distillation to recycle water and nitrogen from water waste. They discovered that nitrogen recovery was the most efficient at higher temperatures and lower pH levels, also they found out that they could recover about 92 percent of water but believe it's possible to reach 100 percent. Also they each made many calculations on the topic to see what theoretically should happen and compare it to the actual results. Both articles describe the concepts pretty similarly. They go into a lot of detail about the process they go through to recycle the waste, and they describe the entire process from beginning to end. Both articles posed the question of how efficient the methods were, and how well they could recycle the waste. The first article determined that they could recycle anywhere from 60-7% of oxygen from the different types of waste, and the second article determine they could recycle around 92% or water from liquid waste.




Part 3: Conventions

The most obvious convention is the jargon because with these kinds of topics there are a lot of technical words and phrases that you have no idea what the meaning is at first glance. Also both of the articles ar split up into multiple sections, and some containing subsections. These sections usually consisted of the research methods that were used to study the topic. Also i'm pretty sure every single scholarly article that exists has an abstract and a conclusion. Some affordances of the articles was the use of charts and graphs. Both of the articles had a lot of graphs to show the results, and the ranged from pie graphs, line graphs, bar graphs, and histograms. Another affordance that I think was pretty unique to these articles was the use of formulas and calculations. Both articles described the calculations they used, and provided the formulas. I think the author's purpose for both of these articles was to persuade the reader to think that the method they were researching is the best option for life support. The main audience of these articles are other scholars in this field of study. This is very obvious since there is a lot of jargon, and anyone else wouldn’t understand what they were reading. Also both articles explain how these are new methods that could be used on manned space missions, which kind of tells you that they were written for other people to use as research in the future. One article even explains how there are other minerals that could be recycled, and that further research should be conducted. The writing style is very formal and informative, because it is well put together and every sentence is just information. The authors of both articles structured them very similar. Both started with an introduction to the concept, and then moved on to the methods of research. Them they explained the results of the research, and finished with their conclusion.




Part 4: Interesting Aspects

What struck me as the most important aspect of the articles was the results and efficiency of the methods. I think it was amazing how the researcher in the second article were able to recover around 92 percent of water from the waste, and the fact that they believe if there was more testing done that they could recover 100 percent of the water. Also they explained how there are a lot more elements and minerals that can be recovered, and that more research should be done on it. That would make that process overall a lot better, and would allow us to recover the majority of the elements from waste through this method.