Two teams selected for Spin Your Thesis!
This year, ESA’s Education Office selected two teams to bring their experiments into a right spin in the name of science. The campaign will take place from 11 to 22 September 2017 at the Large Diameter Centrifuge facility located at ESA's European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC) in Noordwijk, the Netherlands.
During the preparation of their experiments, the students will be supported by ESA's Education Office and hypergravity experts. A member of the European Low Gravity Research Association (ELGRA) will also be on hand to provide advice and expertise in gravity-related research.
The selected teams and their experiments are the following:
The HyMPaCt team is composed of one PhD student and one Bachelor student from the University of Pisa in Italy, as well as one PhD student from INSA de Lyon in France. The team aims to study the effects of different hypergravity levels on the thermal behaviour of a metal foam/paraffin wax composite, which can be used for the thermal management and the heat storage both for space and ground applications, during its melting and solidification process.
The storage of thermal energy via phase-change-materials (PCMs) is particularly enticing since it provides benefits including temperature control and high thermal energy storage density. However, the PCMs are characterised by a relatively low thermal conductivity (around 0.4W/(m·K)), which does not allow to reach high energy storage performance. The issue has been resolved using the high conductivity of Metal Foam. In fact, it allows a larger fraction of the PCM to melt, increasing the energy storage performance. Metal Foam/Paraffin wax materials have not been investigated in hypergravity conditions yet. They can be found in many technological fields, from automotive to aerospace, as well as bio-medicals and chemistry. It is therefore important to understand how the different gravity levels influence the thermal behaviour of these kinds of composite materials, in order to choose the best metal foam characteristics for each particular environment.
The Twistosity team consists of two PhD students from the Imperial College London in the United Kingdom and one PhD student from Technische Universität Dresden in Germany. They want to measure changes in the intracellular viscosity in live biological cells during hypergravity.
Sensing gravity by live biological cells is a puzzling phenomenon, given their small dimensions. However, a large body of evidence demonstrates that even non-specialised cells are affected by gravity. We hypothesise that one of the mechanisms for this sensitivity is the change in the viscosity of the intracellular organelles. We will utilise an emerging method for imaging cellular viscosity based on fluorescent detection from so-called 'molecular rotors' to sense the response of cellular viscosity to conditions of hypergravity using a fluorescent microscope housed in one of the gondolas at the LDC. We will test a number of cell incubation conditions and, if time permits, a number of 'molecular rotors' and cell lines, to obtain detailed organelle specific information on the response of cellular viscosity to gravity. These experiments, if successful, will produce the first quantitative study of changing viscosity under hypergravity conditions, and as such will lay the firm foundation for mechano-biological research under unusual gravity conditions.
This opportunity complements other gravity research opportunities offered by ESA’s Education Office, such as 'Fly Your Thesis!’, 'Drop Your Thesis!' and Rocket EXperiments for University Students/ Balloon Experiments for University Students – ‘REXUS/BEXUS’
