International Space Station Benefits for Humanity by NASA

Author:NASA
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: NASA
Published: 2017-03-28T04:00:00+00:00

Pictured are the tears or legs of wine. Droplets form the vicinity of the fluid’s surface and drip into the wine continuously. Image credit: Professor Hiroshi Kawamura, Tokyo University of Science

The Marangoni experiment has obtained the flow transition process from laminar to turbulent (chaotic) flows. The onset conditions of oscillatory flow were clarified by studying long liquid bridges, which are only available under the microgravity environment present on the space station. This helps to make more accurate predictions of instability onsets that can give rise to different pattern-forming instabilities. In a higher temperature difference regime, transitions to the chaotic and turbulent flows are detected and characterized. This knowledge of the floating zone (liquid bridge), may help in refining a technique that is used to produce extremely high purity crystals by the semiconductor and rare metals industries. Flow disturbance is a major cause for the deterioration of the quality of the crystal grown by this method.

Understanding the rheological (deformation and flow of matter) dynamics in liquid bridges is of fundamental interest for many industrial and biological processes, as well as medical diagnostic devices. For instance, micro-Total Analysis Systems (μ-TAS) are expected to enable on-site medical diagnosis techniques by sampling minute amounts of blood and DNA. In this technique, fluid manipulation is dominated by the interface capillarity. With a stronger understanding of the fundamentals of Marangoni phenomena, practical use of thermocapillarity in microfluidics such as the μ-TAS can be achieved.

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