August 7, 2018 – Skyhaven Systems, LLC was awarded a two-year follow-on contract by NASA to develop a new separation process for removing hydrogen from mixtures of helium and hydrogen. NASA uses a large amount of helium gas to purge hydrogen from fuel lines during space launches and engine development testing. This expensive helium gas is contaminated with hydrogen and is energy intensive to purify and recover. Because of helium shortages and rising prices, cost effective recovery and reclamation of helium from hydrogen-helium gas mixture is of great economic significance to NASA and to the nation. The present cryogenic separation process for this gas mixture is energy intensive, and newer demonstrations using proton-exchange membrane based separation processes are difficult and costly to scale to the size needed to process this large quantity of gas. Accordingly, Skyhaven Systems, LLC has developed a metal membrane based micro-channel separation unit that is readily scalable and inexpensive to produce and operate. The micro-channel separation technology maximizes the separation area per unit volume giving enhanced thermal and mass fluxes to separate hydrogen from the helium mixture.