Gravity places demands on everything on Earth - from the way life has developed to the way materials interact - but on a spacecraft orbiting the Earth, gravity is barely felt. This “microgravity environment” is instrumental in unrevealing processes that are interwoven or overshadowed in normal gravity. Hence, microgravity experiments or models can be used as important tools to analyze and understand complex transport phenomena.
There are a variety of transport phenomena worth studying, which help gain understanding in a variety of domains in Earth research, including Chemistry, Physics and Medicine. In order to be able to perform these important experiments in microgravity situations, specialized instrumentation is required to ensure correct functionality in Space, allowing these studies to replicate or expand on their gravity counterparts.
This Research Topic will consider Original Research and Review articles on all aspects of the instrumentation required for studying transport phenomena in low gravity conditions. Potential topics include, but are not limited to, studies on the instrumentation required for the following in microgravity conditions:
• Biotransport phenomena
• Protein crystal growth
• Biomaterials
• Boiling, melting, vaporization or other effects
• Interfacial phenomena and colloids
• Fluid dynamics
• Pressure control
• Mechanics of foams
Gravity places demands on everything on Earth - from the way life has developed to the way materials interact - but on a spacecraft orbiting the Earth, gravity is barely felt. This “microgravity environment” is instrumental in unrevealing processes that are interwoven or overshadowed in normal gravity. Hence, microgravity experiments or models can be used as important tools to analyze and understand complex transport phenomena.
There are a variety of transport phenomena worth studying, which help gain understanding in a variety of domains in Earth research, including Chemistry, Physics and Medicine. In order to be able to perform these important experiments in microgravity situations, specialized instrumentation is required to ensure correct functionality in Space, allowing these studies to replicate or expand on their gravity counterparts.
This Research Topic will consider Original Research and Review articles on all aspects of the instrumentation required for studying transport phenomena in low gravity conditions. Potential topics include, but are not limited to, studies on the instrumentation required for the following in microgravity conditions:
• Biotransport phenomena
• Protein crystal growth
• Biomaterials
• Boiling, melting, vaporization or other effects
• Interfacial phenomena and colloids
• Fluid dynamics
• Pressure control
• Mechanics of foams
![(A) The mechanism of the Piston Effect. A thin hot boundary layer develops and compresses the bulk fluid. The resultant temperature profile shows i) a small zone of high gradients near the heated boundary, defining the extent δ of the thermal boundary layer and ii) a uniform increase in the other part of the fluid arising at the sound velocity. (B): When heat seemingly flow backwards. The vapor phase of a SF6 sample at 10 K below the CP (ALICE in MIR, 1999) undergoes large overheating during a continuous rise of the cell wall temperature Twall. (Data from Wunenburger et al., 2000). (C) When heat can cool. Undercooling of SF6 fluid after heating by a 100 mW, 4 s heat pulse on Earth at 16.5 K above the CP and (inset) under the weak acceleration of a space shuttle maneuver [three different locations in the fluid; ΔT=T(t)−T(0) with initial temperature T(0)≈Tc]. (Data from Beysens et al. (2011).](https://www.frontiersin.org/_rtmag/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.frontiersin.org%2Ffiles%2FArticles%2F876642%2Ffrspt-03-876642-HTML%2Fimage_m%2Ffrspt-03-876642-g002.jpg&w=3840&q=75)
