Preliminary Study on a Reduced Scaled Model Regarding the Air Diffusion inside a Crew Quarter on Board of the ISS

¹ CAMBI Research Center, Technical University of Civil Engineering Bucharest, 021414 Bucharest, Romania
² Technical University of Cluj Napoca, Department of Mechanical Engineering 400020 Cluj - Napoca, Romania

^* Corresponding author: mihnea.sandu@utcb.ro

Abstract

The paper focus on the air quality inside the Crew Quarters on board of the International Space Station. Several issues to improve were recorded by NASA and ESA and most important of them are the following: noise level reduction, CO₂ accumulation reduction and dust accumulation reduction. The study in this paper is centred on a reduced scaled model used to provide simulations related to the air diffusion inside the CQ. It is obvious that a new ventilation system is required to achieve the three issues mentioned above, and the solutions obtained by means of numerical simulation need to be validated by experimental approach. First of all we have built a reduced scaled physical model to simulate the flow pattern inside the CQ and the equipment inside the CQ has been reproduced using a geometrical scale ratio. The flow pattern was considered isothermal and incompressible. The similarity criteria used was the Reynolds number to characterize the flow pattern and the length scale was set at value 1/4. Water has been used inside the model to simulate air. Velocity magnitude vectors have been obtained using PIV measurement techniques.