Description: Whether in industry, at home, or in the lab, most fluids handing operations and equipment would fail immediately when directly employed in the microgravity environments of orbiting or coast spacecraft. This is due to the innate assumption of gravity in nearly everything we do, make, and think. Thus, special engineering considerations must be made to account for the large length scale inertial-visco-capillary fluid phenomena that occurs when the role of gravity is greatly diminished. The fundamental and applied challenges governing such ‘capillary fluidics’ phenomena are significant and exposure to low-g environments is low. The technical fluid mechanics challenges are real, especially for multiphase microgravity flow of complex fluids in complex geometries with unknown initial conditions in an uncontrolled perturbation environment, with stringent requirements for spaceflight: compact, lightweight, low power, low crew activity, low resource utilization, minimal consumables, and program pressure for miniaturization and automation. In this proposal we first highlight a variety of capillary fluidics challenges faced by NASA relating to sample preparation that are likely to find solutions considering the new state-of-the-art. We then focus on solutions that are cross-cutting to in situ sample preparation and analysis for Biological and Physical Sciences research in microgravity environments. We pursue a survey of the broader aerospace community to find a measure of consensus regarding high-value miniaturizable automatable sample preparation unit operations. We will then design and demonstrate at least one broadly applicable prototype solution addressing the stakeholder requirements. Our Phase II effort aims to provide broad solutions to miniaturized, automated and other in situ sample preparation challenges—for the NASA Biological and Physical Sciences as well as NASA’s Life Support Communities for research, development, and exploration.

Benefits: Our technology delivers devices and processes to conduct safe and efficient capillary fluidics in situ sample preparation operations for NASA BPS, NASA Life Support, space commercial biopharmaceutical industry, and other communities. Spacecraft target environments include microgravity, moon, and mars. We expect to report the successful performance of product-level hardware with performance data to NASA for mission integration. Our contributions will have cross-cutting applications to other troubling fluidics challenges aboard spacecraft.

Commercial spaceflight operators can benefit from all our technology relating to liquid management in space. On Earth our technology is expected to enhance certain liquid/gas/particle separations, improve low-dose metering, rogue bubble and droplet passive separations, as well as have specialty applications for micro-to-milli-scale reacting liquid flows.