Excess Water in Astronaut Helmet During EVA on ISS: Mitigations with Flight Demonstrations
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Following a second crew report of excess water inexplicably accumulating in the helmet during EVA-80 on March 23, 2022, NASA initiated an aggressive effort to identify, mitigate, and/or eliminate all sources of the potentially life-threatening water. Our narration highlights demonstrations of microgravity flow expectations using terrestrial scale models, mitigations to dangerous water migration within the helmet, low-g two-phase flow separations for the flow entering the helmet, and an investigation of the nature of liquid carry-over from the EMU condensing heat exchanger source. Fast-to-flight demonstrations of each aspect of the work are carried out during hands-on crew interaction with flight scale hardware on ISS during the 2022-2023 timeframe. The results of the tests are described with a focus on the rarely observed, and thus rarely studied, large length scale air-driven wall-bound droplet and rivulet two-phase flows in microgravity. The success of the mitigations and directions for continued work is discussed in summary.
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Oleg Krishcko, IRPI LLC, USA
Logan Torres, IRPI LLC, USA
Colin Campbell, NASA Johnson Space Center(JSC), USA
Paul Dum, NASA Johnson Space Center(JSC), USA
John Graf, NASA Johnson Space Center(JSC), USA
Tessa Rundle, NASA Johnson Space Center(JSC), USA
ICES408: ISS US EVA-80 Water Helmet Incident Investigation
The 52nd International Conference on Environmental Systems was held in Calgary, Canada, on 16 July 2023 through 20 July 2023.