Browsing by Author "Oborny, Nathan"
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Item Developmental Hardware Testing Results and Forward Plans for the Spacecraft Water Impurity Monitor (SWIM) Inorganic Water Module (IWM)(2024 International Conference on Environmnetal Systems, 2024-07-21) Noell, Aaron; Oborny, Nathan; Jaramillo, Elizabeth; Ferreira Santos, Mauro; Kok, Miranda; Drevinskas, Tomas; Berg, Andrew; Metz, Brandon; Mello, Tess; Mora, Maria; Willis, PeterThe Spacecraft Water Impurity Monitor (SWIM) seeks to provide enhanced analytical capability that enables NASA to send astronauts on long duration missions to the Moon and Mars without the possibility of returned water samples. The SWIM architecture consists of an Organic Water Module (OWM) and an Inorganic Water Module (IWM), that are independent analytical units but envisioned for complementary use. This paper describes the build and test of developmental hardware for the IWM portion of SWIM. IWM itself has two broad approaches for monitoring potential inorganic contaminants. The first is to develop a portable laboratory style capability that can search for a wide array of potential contaminants in samples, similar to what happens when bag samples are returned to the ground from the ISS. The second approach is to more narrowly focus on potentially high value indicators for continuous or near-continuous real time monitoring. The portable laboratory style capability fundamentally requires a separation science approach in order to specifically separate and detect a wide variety of compounds. IWM developmental hardware is based on capillary electrophoresis (CE) for species separation and capacitively coupled contactless conductivity (C4D) for detection. The CE-C4D hardware was used to broadly separate both common anions (chloride, sulfate, iodide etc.) and cations (sodium, potassium, ammonium, metals, etc.) with the same hardware and reagents. The real-time monitoring capability is based on microfluidic arrays of electrochemical sensors. Specifically, ion selective electrodes (ISEs) and conductivity sensors that can be mated into small volume (microliters) channels for fast measurements. The ISEs can have selectivity for potentially useful general indicators such as pH, sodium and ammonium as well as indicators that might be specific to ion bed breakthrough products like acetate and carbonate. Both capabilities are being matured towards technology demonstration missions and the developmental approach will be outlined.Item Progress on the Organic and Inorganic Modules of the Spacecraft Water Impurity Monitor, a Next Generation Complete Water Analysis System for Crewed Vehicles(2023 International Conference on Environmental Systems, 2023-07-16) Pensinger, Stuart; Callahan, Michael; Neidholdt, Evan; Noell, Aaron; Oborny, Nathan; Bae, Byunghoon; Lopez, Valeria; Hancock, Bruce; Gonzalez, Marianne; Homer, Margie; Madzunkov, Stojan; Darrach, Murray; Kidd, RichardThe Dragonfly Mass Spectrometer (DraMS) is an instrument on the Dragonfly mission operating on the surface of the Titan, the Saturn’s largest moon. Titan's atmosphere is nitrogen rich and has surface atmospheric pressure of 147 kPa and temperature of 94 K. Since electronics cannot survive at these extreme temperatures, significant thermal isolation is needed between the electronics and the Titan atmosphere to maintain the components above their survival temperatures. However, the main electronic box (MEB) for the DraMS instrument dissipates significant amount of heat over small volume and a conventional conductive cooling approach cannot be used without significant mass additions. Instead, a fan cooled approach was chosen. Conditioned room-temperature air, supplied by the Dragonfly lander, will flow directly over the MEB’s boards during DraMS operational scenarios. A cooling air manifold is designed with the help of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations to effectively distribute the flow over the actively cooled boards. Since the fan will operate at denser-than-Earth pressures on Titan but Earth-like pressures during ground testing, a thermal test was performed to verify the fan’s thermal performance (at varying levels of pressure) and compared against CFD predictions. This test was performed with a 3-D printed mockup of the MEB with heated metallic plates to simulate the circuit boards. This paper will discuss the analytical CFD work and the thermal tests performed to aid the development of the DraMS thermal/mechanical MEB design.