The European Space Agency (ESA) is Europe’s gateway to space. Its mission is to shape the development of Europe’s space capability and ensure that investment in space continues to deliver benefits to the citizens of Europe and the world.
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The TEPiM team from Universidad Politecnica de Madrid (UPM) during the 2016 Fly Your Thesis! programme parabolic flight campaign in the Novespace A310 Zero-G aircraft. The team developed an experiment, which studies Marangoni effect during the melting of Phase Change Materials (PCM) in weightlessness. This effect is very hard to study on Earth because convection would govern the phenomena occurring during phase transition. However, in weightlessness, convection is absent, and the team wanted to observe the influence of the Marangoni effect on the melting behaviour of the PCM. Phase Change Materials can be used for thermal control of spacecraft but also have many application on Earth.
Read more about the team's experiment here