Lachlan Maddaford

Who am I and what am I doing?

I graduated from the University of Adelaide at the end of 2022 with a Bachelor of Engineering (Chemical)(Honours 1st Class). Now, I am a fresh PhD student (commenced March 2023) with a focus on applying chemical engineering design to outer-space to advance civilization beyond Low-Earth Orbit sustainably. This is an emerging area with boundless depth. Chemical Engineering underpins our modern-day life in almost every aspect (food, resources, energy, textiles, pharmaceuticals, water, waste management, etc) - if you need to convert a material into a product, you're going to need Chemical Engineering. My work aims to understand these designs and applications to develop new iterations which can achieve the same task in an extreme, extra terrestrial environment. Currently, this involves investigating the effects of gravitational force on several processes.

Outer-space is arguably the most ruthless environment known to humanity. To undertake self-sustaining habitation and exploration beyond LEO requires the use of resources present in the environment often termed as, in situ resource utilization (ISRU). We must not only determine how these processes function, but also understand how to sustainably engineer solutions which provide required products in required quantities from undeveloped and limited resources - with little to no waste.

My hope is that by attempting to sustainably engineer processes suited for these conditions, we will be able not only to explore the cosmos, but improve our quality of life significantly on Earth. 

Thinking about Chemical Engineering in Space begins a endless rabbit hole of wondering what may be different! If you wish to know more about my journey and path - please reach out!

In addition to my PhD, I have:

• Developed a novel expression for the remediation PFAS which I am currently in the process of validating.
• Undertaken a Research Internship with Professor Volker Hessel and Dr Nam Nghiep Tran investigating a process for the extraction of precious metals from real asteroid material. I may have discovered a space-appropriate metal separation method tangential to this project which I hope to investigate further one day.