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water water everywhere...
So, when is the new unit to process urine going to be launched, and has
anyone any idea why two units had such short lives? From what I'm given to understand, the technology is not exactly new, and similar devices have been run on earth for a very long time indeed. Thus it has to be something different about the behaviour of fluids in micro gravity, maybe air bubbles or something. Brian -- Brian Gaff - Note:- In order to reduce spam, any email without 'Brian Gaff' in the display name may be lost. Blind user, so no pictures please! |
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water water everywhere...
Brian Gaff wrote:
From what I'm given to understand, the technology is not exactly new, and similar devices have been run on earth for a very long time indeed. Thus it has to be something different about the behaviour of fluids in micro gravity, maybe air bubbles or something. The Russian experience with Elektron has shown very much that devices that handle any liquid in space behave differently than when tested on the ground. The whole point of the ISS is to develop and test such devices and debug them, measure their MTBF so that when you are realy to build a long duration ship, you have systems with known MTBF and the tooling and documentation needed to do field repairs. It has taken the russians quite a bit of time to debug Elektron (is it reliable by now ?). Lets see how long it takles the americans to debug their water based systems. It isn't an easy job. |
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water water everywhere...
John Doe wrote:
Brian Gaff wrote: From what I'm given to understand, the technology is not exactly new, and similar devices have been run on earth for a very long time indeed. Thus it has to be something different about the behaviour of fluids in micro gravity, maybe air bubbles or something. The Russian experience with Elektron has shown very much that devices that handle any liquid in space behave differently than when tested on the ground. The whole point of the ISS is to develop and test such devices and debug them, measure their MTBF so that when you are realy to build a long duration ship, you have systems with known MTBF and the tooling and documentation needed to do field repairs. It has taken the russians quite a bit of time to debug Elektron (is it reliable by now ?). Lets see how long it takles the americans to debug their water based systems. It isn't an easy job. Right now the trouble with the urine processing system onboard ISS seems to be that astronaut urine is absolutely loaded with calcium, and Russian urine is chemically a bit different from American urine. All we've done up to now is really just to give the engineers a chance to tackle these specific problems. I'm very glad they get to work on them, and that I don't have to. Yuck. Mike Ross |
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