Spaceflight Exercise and Textile Laundering Machine for Improved Human Health

The 52nd International Conference on Environmental Systems was held in Calgary, Canada, on 16 July 2023 through 20 July 2023.

Without a precedent to laundering clothes off-Earth, a preliminary solution space is required to develop a spaceflight laundry machine capable of operating in various gravity fields. With this paper's proposed solution space, human exercise to power a vibration agitation bladder, a closed-loop hydraulic system, and a wastewater sensor suite provide a desirable environment for quantifying waste-mass transfer away from textiles while reducing textile damage. Bond Graph Theory is used to evaluate how human power affects system and cleaning performance because it is amenable to the large variety of machine configurations humans can set and to the coupling expected within the different subsystems. Bond Graph simulation results reveal preliminary performance metrics, sensor types and placements, and the hardware significantly impacting the spaceflight exercise and textile laundering machine's performance. Last, this paper's methodology provides structure in maturing the machine's Spaceflight Technology Readiness Level beyond its current s