ENHANCED CAPILLARY RISE OF WETTING LIQUIDS IN REDUCED GRAVITATIONAL SHIELDING UNDER MICROGRAVITY CONDITIONS

Rise of liquids and bubbles in angular capillary tubes.

We discuss the rise of a liquid inside an angular capillary tube. It is shown that for a wetting liquid, the height of the rise is (as usually) inversely proportional to the length which characterizes the confinement. The exact laws deduced from energetic considerations are found to be in excellent agreement with the data. We then show how such tubes can be used to prevent bubbles from being tr...

Bacterial biofilm formation under microgravity conditions.

Although biofilm formation is widely documented on Earth, it has not been demonstrated in the absence of gravity. To explore this possibility, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, suspended in sterile buffer, was flown in a commercial payload on space shuttle flight STS-95. During earth orbit, biofilm formation was induced by exposing the bacteria to sterile media through a 0.2-microm (pore size) polycarbon...

Dielectrophoretic Rayleigh-Bénard convection under microgravity conditions.

Thermal convection in a dielectric fluid layer between two parallel plates subjected to an alternating electric field and a temperature gradient is investigated under microgravity conditions. A thermoelectric coupling resulting from the thermal variation of the electric permittivity of the fluid produces the dielectrophoretic (DEP) body force, which can be regarded as thermal buoyancy due to an...

Capillary rise of a wetting fluid in a semi-circular groove

Electrostatic modes in collisional complex plasmas under microgravity conditions.

A linear dispersion relation in a highly collisional complex plasma, including ion drift, was derived in the light of recent PKE-Nefedov wave experiment performed under microgravity conditions onboard the International Space Station. Two modifications of dust density waves with wave frequencies larger than the dust-neutral collision frequency were obtained. The relevance to the space observatio...