A student experience

This opportunity has been a great experience as students to use our engineering skills for an exciting and unique research experience. Academically, I was drawn to the freedom and challenge of creating, designing, building, testing, and evaluating a new experiment to be tested in a “weightless” or “zero-g” environment. The rest of me just wanted a ride on the “Weightless Wonder!”
In our experiment, we investigated acoustic control of boiling in micro-gravity. On Earth, heat transfer from boiling is usually taken for granted as a good source of heat dissipation. The bubbles that form on a hot surface are able to escape due to their buoyancy, which is due to gravity because the bubbles weigh less than the liquid. In microgravity environments, such as the International Space Station (ISS), there bubbles do not “weigh” less than the fluid and do not float away from the hot surface, which can result in overheating. As a solution to this problem, we proposed using high-frequency sound waves to push the bubbles off the hot surface to dissipate the heat.
We built a small setup consisting of a tank containing Fluorinert FC-72, which is a liquid with a low boiling point, a heating element, an ultrasonic transducer for sound, and various electronics to power the experiment and to record visual data. This setup was loaded into the “Weightless Wonder,” NASA’s aircraft that would fly our experiment and our crew on a series of parabolas to experience weightlessness.
We flew to NASA’s airfield in Houston, Texas for our flight training and to perform our experiment. Much like the astronauts, we underwent basic training such as an exercise in NASA’s high-altitude chamber in which we were “flown” up to 25,000 ft and breathed low-oxygen air to train us to feel and identify the symptoms of a low oxygen environment.
On flight day, we donned our flight suits and readied our experiment. My first experience with weightless was nothing like I had ever felt before; a big smile came to my face as I floated off the cabin floor, without the restriction of gravity! Once the experiments were completed, the adventurous performed zero-gravity twirls and somersaults. In no other program could I get the educational and physical experiences as I did in the RGFOP, and I encourage other students to take advantage of the program.
Our team would like to thank Ellen Longmire for advising us, Dave Hultman and Mario Costello for helping build our experiment, the Aerospace Engineering and Mechanics Dept., Richard DeLeo, and the University Research Opportunities Program (UROP) for financial support, and the people of NASA’s Reduced Gravity Student Flight Opportunities Program (RGFOP) that provided this opportunity. Each contribution is greatly appreciated.

Mike Mattson, Fluids team member