Experiment design to investigate the possibility of using grey water in aeroponic cultivation of various crops for future long-term space missions

Abstract

One of the crucial steps in the development of self-sufficient extra-terrestrial human colonies is water and biomass management. One of the attempts to simplify the treatment scheme is to directly implement greywater into soil-less cultivation as no greywater treatment unit would be necessary. In this case, the most essential key factor is the influence of surfactants. In this paper, an analysis of various experiment designs is investigated and shown. While full factorial design of experiment would require more than 500 000 tests, with duration of at least 30 days each, an approach to reduce this number to a total of 5 experiments is shown in this paper for initial experiments.