Fluidics: infographic

How liquids behave on Earth is hard to predict and even harder in space without gravity. Getting the last drop out of a packet of orange juice can be a frustrating experience – imagine the challenge for engineers designing satellites to use every drop of fuel in weightlessness or designing rockets with fuel tanks that must deliver fuel to the engines under extreme loads.

The Fluidics experiment looked at a phenomenon called ‘sloshing’ – how liquids move inside closed spaces. The goal is to help industry design better satellite fuel-systems to increase their life and make them less expensive.

A second part of the experiment looked at surface turbulence in liquids. On Earth, gravity and surface tension influence how a force dissipates in waves or ripples. By conducting Fluidics in space, scientists could observe how surface forces behave without gravity – removing one factor from the equation simplifies understanding the phenomenon.

The experiment consisted of three small transparent spheres with a centrifuge to move the liquids inside. One sphere used for the wave turbulence experiment held distilled coloured-water, the other two spheres used for the sloshing experiments used a special liquid developed with low viscosity and little surface tension.

Aside from gaining a better understanding of the movement of fluids this experiment could help us understand our oceans and on a larger scale our planet’s climate as a whole.