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The study led by C. Peromingo, P. Salgado Sánchez, D. Gligor, A. Bello, and J. Rodríguez, published in Physics of Fluids (2023), addresses innovative methods to reduce sloshing in microgravity environments. Simulations were conducted to identify the optimal shape, number, and arrangement of baffles in a rectangular tank. Additionally, temperature modulation was introduced to counteract the original sloshing motion.

Findings: The findings demonstrated that the ideal combination of baffles and temperature modulation reduced sloshing decay time by over 80%. This strategy showed significant potential to enhance liquid stability in microgravity environments.

Applications and Significance: The developed methods have potential applications across various domains, from propulsion systems and water storage in space missions to terrestrial uses, including liquid transport in trucks, manned and unmanned aerial vehicles, and offshore oil extraction plants.

Conclusions: The study highlights the importance of innovative techniques in controlling sloshing in microgravity, underscoring their relevance not only in space missions but also in numerous terrestrial systems.

Cross-shaped baffles

You can also read here the AIP article.

La entrada Slowing sloshing in space: Exploring innovative techniques aparece primero en E-USOC.

Development and validation of the on-board procedures and automatic scripts, planning of the on-board activities, remote control and monitoring of the payload, troubleshooting of anomalies in a quick and agile way, data retrieval and dissemination to the scientific community, have been some of the tasks carried on by E-USOC in this project, for which there has been a tight coordination and collaboration with NASA.

NASA astronaut Mike Hopkins (@astroillini) installed ESA’s Selectable Optical Diagnostics Instrument (SODI) inside the Microgravity Science Glovebox (MSG) on November 14, although the Cell Array (CA) of fluids was not installed until the end of the month, when it reached the ISS aboard the Progress 53 cargo ship. One of the most determining factors for the success of the mission was the limited lifetime of those fluid samples, an event determined by the appearance of bubbles. So, prior to its arrival to the Space Station, E-USOC team conducted a thorough optical checkout and calibration tests of relevant importance, because they allowed to start operating and generating useful science data from the very first moment of the Cell Array installation.

The mission concluded successfully after more than two month of operations. The payload was uninstalled on February 7th and the Cell Array was removed and is planned to be disposed of (destructive re-entry in a Progress spacecraft).

From the scientific point of view, the experiment has generated a substantial amount of high quality images of great value for the analysis of the processes involved in the diffusion of ternary fluid mixtures. In light of these good results, both NASA and ESA agreed to extend the operations one additional week. The extra activities turned out to produce more valuable science data, not considered initially in the mission’s main purposes. For example, the gas bubble appearing in the liquid cell over time was used by the science team for thermo/solute capillary (Marangoni effect) convection runs. Furthermore, downloaded images from the primary runs already seem to prove the predicted huge Soret effect.

E-USOC has received international recognition for the great performance in these operations. The European Space Agency in particular said:

“The Agency would like to remark outstanding activities done by E-USOC in performing SODI-DCMIX2 and the positive conclusion of the DCMIX2 experiments, as also positively acknowledged by the science community. The Agency congratulates E-USOC to this success.”

Source: NASA

It is worth mentioning that the E-USOC team member José Miguel Ezquerro has been nominated to the prestigious Zeldovich Medal, a prize awarded by the Russian Academy of Sciences and the COSPAR Space Scientific Committee to young scientists for their excellence.

DCMIX2 is the second of a series of five experiments. E-USOC has been designated by ESA as responsible for the SODI payload, and has already started working on the preparation activities for DCMIX3, foreseen for the end of 2014.

La entrada SODI-DCMIX2: From the ISS to the oil field aparece primero en E-USOC.

“Our work has always been recognized by European Space Agency and scientific teams with whom we have worked, but we did not expect this great institutional recognition, because many people work around the International Space Station and it is very difficult be nominated and awarded “. With these words, the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM) Professor and E-USOC director, Ana Laverón, has expressed their surprise for receiving one of the awards.

On behalf of E-USOC team, two of its members have attended the third edition of the ESA ISS Awards, held on 26 March in ESTEC’s Erasmus Centre (Netherlands).They have come as nominees in Awards (2013) for the Increment 31/32.

The reasons for the nomination have been that Spanish USOC has provided an outstanding operational support throughout the execution of the GEOFLOW-2 experiment. For several months, the team led by Dr. Ana Laveron has provided continuous support to the GEOFLOW science team, always with a positive attitude. The E-USOC has also gained significant experience in the operational support of several hardware malfunctions / anomalies, ensuring valuable operational data gathering to support the work of the engineering community.

The award was introduced by astronaut André Kuipers, who was at the ISS for the increment 31/32, a symbol of the union between the different people that make space research. The trophy itself is a piece of ESA’s history – it is a bronze casting of astronaut Hans Schlegel’s Extra Vehicular Activity glove, used for the installation of the Columbus module on the Space Station in 2008. It symbolizes the handshake of trust between the crew and those that made the missions a success.

Indeed, among those on earth, is the Operations Center and Spanish User Support, located on Technical University of Madrid Campus of International Excellence Montegancedo. Ana Laverón, in charge of E-USOC, argues:

“This award has been the best recognition of the efforts that we have been devoted to obtain the best possible science from the experiments delegated to us by the European Space Agency.”

E-USOC has recently finished the operations on Geoflow-2B experiment, which obtained experimental and essential results to validate numerical models on the flow and composition of the Earth’s core and it is preparing the next, DCMIX-2, an experiment for study ternary diffusion in fluids. They will operate it during two or three months after its arrival at the ISS.

Expertise, professionalism and dedication were recognized in the third ISS Award ceremony. The Director of Human Spaceflight and Operations, Thomas Reiter, called the event “a unique opportunity to celebrate the achievements of the many excellent colleagues who with their expertise and through their personal dedication have contributed to successful missions.” Cooperation between all people involved in each mission is the key to its proper functioning and therefore they defined themselves as “a big family”, she said.

Source: ESA

La entrada E-USOC awarded by the European Space Agency aparece primero en E-USOC.

After 13 months of continuous operations and more than 260 GB of science data generated, science campaign for GeoFlow-2 can be considered a huge success, overpassing all expectative and giving more results than initially expected. GeoFlow-2 objective was to generate further results to check and improve numeric models of the Earth mantle. That information complements the results obtained by geological phenomena numeric simulators, confirming or ameliorating their conclusions.

The experiment has investigated the flow of an incompressible viscous fluid (alkanol 1-Nonanol) held between two concentric spheres. A central force field was introduced by applying a high voltage difference between the two spheres. Maintaining the inner sphere at a higher temperature to the outer sphere also created a temperature gradient from inside to outside. Finally both spheres rotated at up to 2Hz. This geometrical configuration can be seen as a representation of the Earth, where the role of gravity is played by the central electric field; nevertheless the unidirectional term due to real gravity had to be eliminated, being that the main reason why microgravity was fundamental for this experiment.

Understanding and controlling fluid flow in a spherical geometry under the influence of rotation will also be useful in a variety of engineering applications, such as improving spherical gyroscopes and bearings, and centrifugal pumps. Furthermore, study of effects, which serve to simulate the central gravity field, will find applications in areas such as high-performance heat exchangers and in the study of electroviscous phenomena. It will also help to understand the motion of liquids in several ground-based industrial applications where injected ions are a source of charge, e.g. in electrostatic precipitators and ion-drag pumps.

GeoFlow-2, as its predecessor, works inside the Fluid Science Laboratory onboard Columbus. GeoFlow-2 operations, performed by the E-USOC in collaboration with MARS (Microgravity Advanced Research and Support Centre), ended in May 2012, and are expected to be resumed under the name of GeoFlow-2B before 2013.

More information:

La entrada Discover GeoFlow-2: an Earth model inside the ISS aparece primero en E-USOC.

Source: E-USOC

This second attempt was requested by scientists to clarify the following scientific aspects detected after the thorough experiment analysis from the COLLOID data obtained last year:

After three weeks of operations inside the MSG rack, COLLOID-2 objectives were fulfilled, generating around 93 GB of scientific data. This successful science achievement came together with the completion of 10.000 hours of MSG work on board the ISS.

COLLOID container was removed from MSG rack on 4th October 2011 and stored temporarily in the ISS for its further disposal. The Flash disk containing all the scientific data will be downloaded next spring within the new SpaceX-1 spacecraft, providing the scientists with a good set of valuable data for their research.

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