An investigation of the aerodynamic characteristics of a new general aviation airfoil in flight

A low speed airfoil, the GA(W)-2, - a 13% thickness to chord ratio airfoil was evaluated. The wing of a Beech Sundowner was modified at by adding balsa ribs and covered with aluminum skin, to alter the existing airfoil shape to that of the GA(W)-2 airfoil. The aircraft was flown in a flight test program that gathered wing surface pressures and wake data from which the lift drag, and pitching moment of the airfoil could be determined. After the base line performance of the airfoil was measured, the drag due to surface irregularities such as steps, rivets and surface waviness was determined. The potential reduction of drag through the use of surface coatings such as KAPTON was also investigated

Lightweight Radiator System for a Spacecraft

Three documents describe various aspects of a proposed lightweight, deployable radiator system for dissipating excess heat from the life-support system of a habitable spacecraft. The first document focuses on a radiator tube that would include a thin metal liner surrounded and supported by a thicker carbon-fiber-reinforced composite tubular structure that, in turn, would be formed as part of a unitary composite radiator-fin structure consisting mostly of a sheet of reticulated vitreous carbon laminated between carbon-fiber-reinforced face sheets. The thermal and mechanical properties, including the anisotropies, of the component materials are taken into account in the design. The second document describes thermo-structural bumpers, in the form of exterior multiple-ply carbon-fiber sheets enclosing hollows on opposite sides of a radiator fin, which would protect the radiator tube against impinging micrometeors and orbital debris. The third document describes a radiator system that would include multiple panels containing the aforementioned components, among others. The system would also include mechanisms for deploying the panels from compact stowage. Deployment would not involve breaking and remaking of fluid connections to the radiator panels

Terrestrial Testing of the CapiBRIC, a Microgravity Optimized Brine Processor

Utilizing geometry based static phase separation exhibited in the radial vaned capillary drying tray, a system was conceived to recover water from brine. This technology has been named the Capillary BRIC; abbreviated CapiBRIC. The CapiBRIC utilizes a capillary drying tray within a drying chamber. Water is recovered from clean water vapor evaporating from the free surface leaving waste brine solids behind. A novel approach of optimizing the containment geometry to support passive capillary flow and static phase separation provides the opportunity for a low power system that is not as susceptible to fouling as membranes or other technologies employing physical barriers across the free brine surface to achieve phase separation in microgravity. Having been optimized for operation in microgravity, full-scale testing of the CapiBRIC as designed cannot be performed on the ground as the force of gravity would dominate over the capillary forces. However, subscale units relevant to full-scale design were used to characterize fill rates, containment stability, and interaction with a variable volume reservoir in the PSU Dryden Drop Tower (DDT) facility. PSU also using tested units scaled such that capillary forces dominated in a 1-g environment to characterize evaporation from a free-surface in 1-g upward, sideways and downward orientations. In order to augment the subscale testing performed by PSU, a full scale 1-g analogue of the CapiBRIC drying unit was initiated to help validate performance predictions regarding expected water recovery ratio, estimated processing time, and interface definitions for inlets, outlets, and internal processes, including vent gas composition. This paper describes the design, development and test of the terrestrial CapiBRIC prototypes

Advancements in Spacecraft Brine Water Recovery: Development of a Radial Vaned Capillary Drying Tray

Technology improvements in the recovery of water from brine are critical to establishing closedloop water recovery systems, enabling long duration missions, and achieving a sustained human presence in space. A genre of 'in-place drying' brine water recovery concepts, collectively referred to herein as Brine Residual In-Containment (BRIC), are under development which aim to increase the overall robustness and reliability of the brine recovery process by performing drying inside the container used for final disposal of the solid residual waste. Implementation of in-place drying techniques have been demonstrated for applications where gravity is present and phase separation occurs naturally by buoyancy induced effects. In this work, a microgravity compatible analogue of the gravity-driven phase separation process is considered by exploiting capillarity in the form of surface wetting, surface tension, and container geometry. The proposed design consists of a series of planar radial vanes aligned about a central slotted core. Preliminary testing of the fundamental geometry in a reduced gravity environment has shown the device to spontaneously fill and saturate rapidly creating a free surface from which evaporation and phase separation can occur similar to a 1-g like 'cylindrical pool' of fluid. Mathematical modeling and analysis of the design suggest predictable rates of filling and stability of fluid containment as a function of relevant system dimensions, e.g., number of vanes, vane length, width, and thickness. A description of the proposed capillary design solution is presented along with preliminary results from testing, modeling and analysis of the system

Fifty-Plus-Year Postflight Analysis of First Fluid Experiment Aboard a Spacecraft

This year marks the 55th anniversary of the first fluid physics experiment performed aboard a spacecraft during the Mercury-Atlas 7 mission. Since then, NASA has conducted over 80 fluids physics experiments aboard a variety of spacecraft, many of which have enhanced the understanding of large-length-scale capillary phenomena relevant to liquid management in the weightless state. As both celebration and demonstration, the Mercury-Atlas 7 fluids experiment is revisited in light of the current understanding of large-length-scale capillary fluidics. Employing a modern numerical tool, a rich variety of experimental outcomes are discovered that were not observed during the flight experiment. Interestingly, experimental support for these “newly computed” outcomes draws from 54-year-old drop-tower data collected by the original NASA investigator team. A direction forward for advanced tankage design is highlighted in summary

Advances in Spacecraft Brine Water Recovery: Development of a Radial Vaned Capillary Drying Tray

Technology improvements in the recovery of water from brine are critical to establishing closed-loop water recovery systems, enabling long-duration missions, and achieving a sustained human presence in space. A genre of 'in-place drying' brine water recovery concepts, collectively referred to herein as Brine Residual In-Containment, are under development. These brine water recovery concepts aim to increase the overall robustness and reliability of the brine recovery process by performing drying inside the container used for final disposal of the solid residual waste. Implementation of in-place drying techniques have been demonstrated for applications where gravity is present and phase separation occurs naturally by buoyancy-induced effects. In this work, a microgravity-compatible analogue of the gravity-driven phase separation process is considered by exploiting capillarity in the form of surface wetting, surface tension, and container geometry. The proposed design consists of a series of planar radial vanes aligned about a central slotted core. Preliminary testing of the fundamental geometry in a reduced gravity environment has shown the device to spontaneously fill and saturate rapidly, thereby creating a free surface from which evaporation and phase separation can occur similar to a terrestrial-like 'cylindrical pool' of fluid. Mathematical modeling and analysis of the design suggest predictable rates of filling and stability of fluid containment as a function of relevant system dimensions; e.g., number of vanes, vane length, width, and thickness. A description of the proposed capillary design solution is presented along with preliminary results from testing, modeling, and analysis of the system

Design Status of the Capillary Brine Residual in Containment Water Recovery System

One of the goals of the AES Life Support System (LSS) Project is to achieve 98% water loop closure for long duration human exploration missions beyond low Earth orbit. To meet this objective, the AES LSS Project is developing technologies to recover water from wastewater brine; highly concentrated waste products generated from a primary water recovery system. The state of the art system used aboard the International Space Station (ISS) has the potential to recover up to 85% water from unine wastewater, leaving a significant amounts of water in the waste brine, the recovery of which is critical technology gap that must be filled in order to enable long duration human exploration. Recovering water from the urine wastewater brine is complicated by the concentration of solids as water is removed from the brine, and the concentration of the corrosive, toxic chemicals used to stabilize the urine which fouls and degrades water processing hardware, and poses a hazard to operators and crew. Brine Residual in Containment (BRIC) is focused on solids management through a process of "in-place" drying - the drying of brines within the container used for final disposal. Application of in-place drying has the potential to improve the safety and reliability of the system by reducing the exposure to curew and hardware to the problematic brine residual. Through a collaboration between the NASA Johnson Space Center and Portland Status University, a novel water recovery system was developed that utilizes containment geometry to support passive capillary flow and static phase separation allowing free surface evaporation to take place in a microgravity environment. A notional design for an ISS demonstration system was developed. This paper describes the testing performed to characterize the performance of the system as well as the status of the system level design

Capillary Flows Along Open Channel Conduits: The Open-Star Section

No abstract availabl

Capillary Channel Flow (CCF) EU2-02 on the International Space Station (ISS): An Experimental Investigation of Passive Bubble Separations in an Open Capillary Channel

It would be signicantly easier to design fluid systems for spacecraft if the fluid phases behaved similarly to those on earth. In this research an open 15:8 degree wedge-sectioned channel is employed to separate bubbles from a two-phase flow in a microgravity environment. The bubbles appear to rise in the channel and coalesce with the free surface in much the same way as would bubbles in a terrestrial environment, only the combined effects of surface tension, wetting, and conduit geometry replace the role of buoyancy. The host liquid is drawn along the channel by a pump and noncondensible gas bubbles are injected into it near the channel vertex at the channel inlet. Control parameters include bubble volume, bubble frequency, liquid volumetric flow rate, and channel length. The asymmetrically confined bubbles are driven in the cross-flow direction by capillary forces until they at least become inscribed within the section or until they come in contact with the free surface, whereupon they usually coalesce and leave the flow. The merging of bubbles enhances, but does not guarantee, the latter. The experiments are performed aboard the International Space Station as a subset of the Capillary Channel Flow experiments. The flight hardware is commanded remotely and continuously from ground stations during the tests and an extensive array of experiments is conducted identifying numerous bubble flow regimes and regime transitions depending on the ratio and magnitude of the gas and liquid volumetric flow rates. The breadth of the publicly available experiments is conveyed herein primarily by narrative and by regime maps, where transitions are approximated by simple expressions immediately useful for the purposes of design and deeper analysis