Space To Innovate - Inventions Made In Space

Space to Innovate
Get a glimpse of where we are and where we're headed in this space for innovations brought to you by the ISS!

Consumer Products developed through research on ISS

Health Advancements brought by research in space

Industrial Improvements brought by ISS research

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How Would You Rate It?

You want great engineers designing bridges especially when there’s a lot of weight on them at once! What is the widest bridge that you’ve been over?

Three or four lanes of traffic in both directions (total of 6 – 8 lanes)

Seven or more lanes of traffic in both directions (total of 14 or more lanes)

Five or six lanes of traffic in both directions (total of 10 – 12 lanes)

Two lanes of traffic in both directions (total of 4 lanes)

Simulation Software

Industrial Improvements

The ISS + Liquid Metal = … A genre of music on an astronaut's iPod? Perhaps, but not likely. It's actually a reference to research on the ISS that centers on examining solid-liquid mixtures: liquid metals. With essentially no gravity acting on them, liquids behave differently than they do on Earth. Scientists can manipulate metals in their liquid form and observe how they respond to different forces. But … simulation software? Like first-person shooter games, you play on game systems or online? Perhaps, but not likely. The ISS research on solid-liquid mixtures helps simulation software for engineers. The research helps software designers better understand different metals, such as their strength, their response under certain conditions like temperature changes, etc. The engineers use the improved software to simulate structural designs — to design and build a virtual bridge, for example. More than just seeing what it looks like, you can determine how sturdy the bridge would be with different designs, different building materials, and different conditions that would put stress on the bridge. More accurate simulations? There's no perhaps about it!

There are many different types of metal — heavy metal, speed metal, power metal … No. Not that kind of metal! More like aluminum, iron, gold, silver — the non-music metals. Actually, many of the metals that we use and encounter every day are not pure metals but metals that are mixed with other elements (including other metals).

Metals in the mixed form are known as alloys. Steel is an alloy of iron and carbon. Titanium is a pure metal, but when it's used for spacecraft or golf clubs, it's an alloy that includes other metals like aluminum and iron. An alloy tends to have qualities that are better than its main metal. Steel is stronger than iron. A titanium alloy is stronger and lighter than pure titanium.

Alloys are like recipes, and people have been sharing alloy recipes and creating them for more than 3,000 years. During that time, the best combinations of metals and other elements developed through experimentation. Trial and error. Their recipes were passed on from one person to another. Experimentation continued to create different ratios (amounts) of "ingredients" and even different alloys.

Only recently have people been able to experiment on alloys in microgravity! Experimentation may still involve some trial and error, but scientists can better control the experiments, better test the results, and better understand how and why certain combinations work better than others. And on the ISS in particular, scientists get an even better understanding of alloys.

Gravity strongly affects many processes, including the way liquids move and turn into a solid when the temperature is lowered. Creating alloys requires converting metals into their liquid form by heating them up. And the characteristics of an alloy, such as its strength and its resistance to heat and corrosion depend greatly on how the alloy mixture behaves in liquid form and on how it solidifies.

In microgravity, scientists can study aspects of how liquids behave and solidify in experiments that would be difficult or even impossible on the ground. For example, buoyancy is a major cause of the movement of molecules within a fluid (convection), and it depends on gravity. Buoyancy is what makes things float on Earth — the upward force a fluid exerts on an object that pushes in the opposite direction of gravity. In the microgravity environment of the ISS, there is effectively no buoyancy, so scientists can examine the other causes of convection.

Studying how fluids behave in microgravity reveals important properties of the alloys when they are in their solid form. And the work on the ISS has led directly to the development of improved alloys that are "shapeable" metals. However, the alloys research on the ISS has also led to improved simulation software.

That's right. Software that helps simulate real-world situations. If you've played any simulation games online or on a game system, there were people who created the software to make it seem realistic. Imagine if the software designers had to create a three-dimensional simulated world without much understanding of the world they were creating? What if the designers of Madden or FIFA had seen only photographs of people playing football or soccer? They would have a difficult time creating a simulation that seemed authentic, right?

Not all simulation software is for entertainment. Some really important simulation software is for engineering. The software allows engineers to design and "build" simulated structures in a virtual environment. It is much safer and cost effective to design and build skyscrapers or bridges through virtual experimentation than it is through experimentation with real materials!

Now, back to the ISS and the Madden/FIFA question … You want the software designers to know as much about what they're simulating as possible. Because the research on the ISS helps scientists better understand alloys, they have been able to share the results of their experiments with software designers who create simulations for engineers. Because the software designers better understand how alloys perform under different circumstances and different combinations, they can feed that information into their software, allowing engineers to experiment with different combinations in THEIR designs. Because engineers can experiment with greater certainty that a real structure will perform like its simulated version, engineers are able to build better structures like bridges!