March 24, 2014
The Women in Aerospace for Leadership and Development (WIALD) student organization is one of eighteen teams selected to participate in NASA’s 2014 Reduced Gravity Education Flight Program (RGEFP).
The RGEFP provides undergraduate students with experience in proposing, designing, fabricating, flying and evaluating a reduced gravity experiment over the course of a year. NASA aligns the program with its research objectives allowing students to directly impact future NASA missions with their experiment findings.
WIALD’s experiment, “Properties of Vectran Combustion in Microgravity,” will be tested in reduced gravity aboard a NASA microgravity simulation aircraft in late May. Eight WIALD members will spend a week in Houston, where they will train and fly their project aboard the aircraft as it flies a series of parabolas to simulate zero gravity.
The project will undertake one of NASA’s main research objectives – how to reduce the risk of fire on future manned missions to Mars. The group has been working with NASA mentor, Johanna Goforth, who has assisted them throughout the entire process by answering questions and giving them advice.
WIALD will specifically be testing the thermal properties of Vectran in microgravity, which has never been done before. Vectran is a high-performance multifilament material that exhibits exceptional strength and rigidity. Bigelow Aerospace is the first space corporation to use Vectran as a structural material for a spacecraft, the BA-330. NASA has partnered with Bigelow to add these expandable space habitation modules to the International Space Station.
“This is the most intense project we have ever done,” said Nicole Pinto, WIALD President. “This is a full-on massive engineering project that has given us real-world experience and has taught us how to be professional engineers.”
To test Vectran’s combustion properties in microgravity, WIALD designed a cylindrical aluminum structure composed of three separate chambers: a clean sample chamber, an experimental chamber and a disposal chamber. The cylinder will have arms connected to a manual magnetic turning system that will hold samples of Vectran. The arms with the samples of Vectran will swing out from the clean sample chamber into the experimental chamber, where a piece of Vectran will be burnt. Once the test is completed, the arm with the burned Vectran will swing into the disposal chamber.
WIALD will measure the spread rate and byproducts of Vectran combustion and analyze the data from a thermal imaging camera to create a basic thermal profile of Vectran in microgravity. Knowledge of these results could aid in the detection of fires deep in space.
“For WIALD this is a completely new experience, to be on the cutting edge of research,” Pinto said. “Not only are we learning a lot about what it means to not have an answer to our problems written in the back of a book, but it puts us in a position to continue this kind of meaningful research in the future. It’s been a fantastic learning experience for each of us individually and the team as a whole.”
WIALD would like to thank their sponsors who made this experiment possible: Millennium Engineering & Integration Company, Dick and Judy Perkins, the Angelo Miele Endowment, SpaceX, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Texas Space Grant Consortium, Emergent Space Technologies, National Instruments, UT's Women in Engineering Program and UT's Student Engineering Council.
