Document Type

Conference Paper

Journal/Book Title/Conference

AIP Conference Proceedings

Publisher

AIP Publishing

Publication Date

9-11-2013

First Page

1

Last Page

5

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License

Abstract

Several critical questions need to be answered to determine the potential utility of phase change materials as long-term orbital references: How accurate and repeatable will phase change reference implementations be after incorporating necessary design trade-offs to accommodate launch and the space environment? How, if at all, will the microgravity environment affect the phase transitions? Will the long-term stability of the apparatus be affected by gradual contamination of the materials or degradation of the container, or by drift in instrumentation used to realize the automated melts? To help answer some of these questions, three experiments will be conducted on the International Space Station (ISS). Through long-time contacts at the Institute for Biomedical Problems (IBMP) in Moscow Russia, SDL has negotiated all of the flight qualification, launch and return vehicles, and crew time necessary to carry out these experiments. The experiments will test melts and freezes of three different phase change materials in various containment apparatus. Current status of the ISS experiments, as well as results from the CORSAIR black body testing, are presented.

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