Team selected for Drop Your Thesis! 2015
The university student team for Drop Your Thesis! 2015 has been selected. These students will now work with experts from across Europe to develop their experiment. When ready it will be conducted at the world-class Centre of Applied Space Technology and Microgravity (ZARM) in Bremen, Germany.
The selected team is called Dropping Drops and is composed of one BSc and one MSc student from the FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg in Germany. One student is studying chemical- and bioengineering, the other mechanical engineering.
They propose using a high speed camera to study the penetration of large liquid drops upon contact with a porous surface. The wetting of porous surfaces is crucial to application where the three states of matter coexist, for example fuel cells, filtration, CO2 sequestration, heat pipes or the wetting of soils.
In ordinary gravity, only the smallest droplets can be studied penetrating the material. This is because drops larger than about a millimetre in size deform under the pull of gravity, spoiling the penetration. In microgravity, the team can study in high accuracy the larger drops over a longer penetration time.
Designing, building and testing the experiment is expected to take about six months. Then the Dropping Drops team will spend two weeks at ZARM. The first week will be dedicated to integration and ground testing of the experiment while the actual microgravity tests will take place in the second.
The drop tower at ZARM is a unique European facility that provides up to 9.3 seconds of microgravity conditions. Dropping drops will be released from the top of the 146-metre drop tower, providing 4.7 seconds of microgravity. Each drop is known as a ‘launch’ and Dropping Drops is scheduled for five launches.
ESA’s Drop Your Thesis! programme provides university students with the chance to perform experimental research in facilities not usually accessible to students.
Once a year, usually in September, the ESA Education Office opens a call for proposals in which teams of university students each submit a proposal for a microgravity experiment. The investigation may be in any research field as long as it is linked to the student’s syllabus.
A selection board comprising experts from ESA’s Education Office, ESA’s Directorate of Human Spaceflight and Operations, ZARM and ELGRA (European Low Gravity Research Association) then choose the best project to take forward. The ESA Education Office offers financial support to the selected teams to cover part of the cost of the experiments hardware, travel and accommodation.
Dropping Drops was selected in March 2015. It marks the seventh Drop Your Thesis! experiment. The campaign will take place from 2 to 13 November 2015. During the preparation, the students will be supported by ESA's Education Office and ZARM engineers. A member of ELGRA will also be on hand to provide advice and expertise in gravity-related research.
To see what an experimental campaign looks like, watch our video: Drop Your Thesis!
More information about the Drop Your Thesis! programme can be found here or by contacting dropyourthesis @ esa.int
At the other end of the gravity scale, the ESA Education Office offers university students the opportunity to perform hypergravity experiments in the Large Diameter Centrifuge facility located at ESA’s European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC) in Noordwijk, the Netherlands. More information about the Spin Your Thesis! programme can be found here.
