NASA Tech Talks: Ceramic Ion Transport Membranes

Name: NASA Tech Talks: Ceramic Ion Transport Membranes
Start: 2025-09-25T18:00:00-05:00
End: 2025-09-25T19:00:00-05:00
Location: Ion

The event has passed

Category: Aerospace, Founders & Startups, General Community

Free

Past Event

WHEN

Thursday

September 25, 2025

6:00 pm - 7:00 pm CDT

WHERE

Ion

4201 Main Street
Houston, TX 77002 + Google Map

what

We want HOU! Join us to discover NASA’s toughest tech challenges—and apply your skills and expertise to solve them.

Join us this month for John Graf’s “Ceramic Ion Transport Membranes – A new method for oxygen generation”

For the past 50 years, there have been three commercially available methods for oxygen generation:

Cryogenic air separation plants provide industrial scale oxygen to steel mills and petrochemical plants. This technology is cost effective at large scale, but cryogenic air separation is not practical for small scale portable oxygen.
Pressure Swing Adsorption (PSA) systems have been commercially available since the 1980’s. PSA systems are effective for small scale compact portable systems, but they require regular maintenance.
Water electrolysis oxygen generators have converted oxygen into oxygen in confined spaces like submarines and spacecraft for more than 70 years. Water electrolysis systems can store oxygen in the form of water, which is dense and safe and stable. Use of water electrolysis systems is limited to confined space applications, because the energy cost of splitting water is relatively high.

NASA has been leading efforts to develop a new kind of oxygen generation technology. Ceramic Ion Transport Membranes can extract oxygen from air using a mechanism that is solid state. Small scale, portable Ion Transport Membrane systems can be effectively built, the oxygen generator shown in the figure below is smaller than 0.5 m3, it has operated continuously for 366 days with no maintenance and no changes in system performance. Ceramic Ion Transport Membrane systems produce oxygen with purity >99.9%

NASA is developing the technology to enable the recharge of spacesuit oxygen tanks with high purity, high pressure oxygen, but this new technology has the potential to address other oxygen generation applications including: medical oxygen in remote locations, ultrapure oxygen, oxygen for laser cutting, and oxygen for semiconductor manufacture. Recent developments in membrane manufacturing have matured the technology and enabled commercialization. American Oxygen, the company manufacturing ceramic ion transport membrane systems for NASA plans to sell commercial systems in 2026.

Please join us after the talk for drinks and networking at Second Draught!

About the Speakers

John Graf, P.E., Ph.D. serves a Technology Development Lead for Life Support at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. John will describe NASA’s work developing an entirely new kind of oxygen generation with the potential to increase system life, reduce cost, and improve reliability.

Montgomery B. Goforth has more than 40 years of experience as both Engineer and Manager in a variety of highly technical space and defense-related efforts. After working for a small defense contractor specializing in anti-submarine warfare, he joined NASA’s Johnson Space Center in 1990. He has held leadership positions in multiple JSC Directorates and Program Offices. In his current role as Assistant Director of the JSC Engineering Directorate, he has established a framework to better focus Engineering’s efforts towards Human Spaceflight technology and systems development consistent with JSC and Agency goals for exploration. He has used this framework to guide Engineering’s internal investments and external partnerships supporting Lunar and Mars Exploration. Mr. Goforth was born in East Texas, raised in Southern California and Arizona, and graduated from Rice University (BSME 1982, MSME 1987).

About NASA Tech Talks

In these presentations, occurring the fourth Thursdays of the month, Mr. Montgomery Goforth and other aerospace subject matter experts will discuss the technology development challenges faced by NASA’s Johnson Space Center and the surrounding Aerospace community in our ongoing efforts as the hub of human spaceflight. Presentations will focus on the ways in which these challenges, and the associated opportunities, can be leveraged by Houston’s innovation community. We will continue to identify potential space/terrestrial technologies of interest to Human Spaceflight. Past NASA Tech Talks have included topics such as:

From Space to Startup: Leveraging NASA Technology and Innovation to Propel Your Growing Enterprise
Disruptive Filter Technology for Spacecraft Water Treatment: The New Promise of Graphene
Lunar dust capture using novel multiplexed inertial filter
Lunar Passive Fuel Cell Technologies:
Microbes in Space

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NASA Tech Talks: Ceramic Ion Transport Membranes

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NASA Tech Talks: Ceramic Ion Transport Membranes

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