Fluidic Solutions for In Situ Sample Preparation in Microgravity

Safe successful fluids handling is essential aboard low-g spacecraft for BPS experiments, life support equipment, plant and animal habitats, fuels, coolants, etc. Due to the unfamiliar, unearthly, and unforgiving low-g environment, special engineering considerations must be made to account for the large length scale capillary flows that occur when the role of gravity is greatly diminished.Unfortunately, the fundamental and applied challenges governing such capillary fluidics phenomena are significant, compounded by our limited access to prolonged low-g environments, and our less than stellar success at performing seemingly simple taskslike those required for routine wet lab operations, such as in situ sample preparation in the orbiting laboratory of the ISS. Though NASA faces numerous low-g fluids challenges relating to sample preparation, there is hope to find solutions via the new state-of-the-art. Following our Phase I survey of the BPS community, we focus on a down-selected list of challenge problems of cross-cutting value to NASA and the commercial aerospace community. To stakeholder requirements, we then design, build, and demonstrate 12 prototypes of varied complexity addressing sample prep unit operations: resealable vials, low-g well plates, pipetting workstations, custom microscope slides, graduated bubble separating syringes, degassing substrates, passive liquid and bubble separators, and more. Our Phase II goal is to bring these devices and more to flight fidelity, greatly accelerating the establishment of a kit of plumbing parts (solutions) for safe routine wet lab activities aboard spacecraft. From a NASA BPS and commercial biopharmaceutical industry perspective, mundane, safe, routine, efficient, and effective liquids manipulation and analysis operations must be performed for a wide variety of microgravity Fluid Physics or other bio-fluids experiments investigating complex fluid interactions in the low-g environment. The safe handling of soft matter and biological materials in low-g is critical for sample preparation and post-experiment analyses. The samples may consist of complex, volatile, non-Newtonian, particulate-laden liquids, but their collection, preparation, delivery, and disposal must be carried out without the potentially deleterious hazards of dispensing reactants, rehydration of samples, mixing, transferring, de-bubbling, drying, desiccating, sealing, and potentially cleansing containers for re-use—all in low-g. These are significant engineering challenges, but they must be addressed considering miniaturization and automation such that successful low-g studies may be completed at pace. Such challenges extend to NASA Life Support applications as well. Our Phase II effort seeks to produce numerous flight fidelity devices providing solutions to fluids handling challenges relating to sample preparation aboard spacecraft. We have identified numerous application problems requiring uniquely low-g capillary fluids handling solutions and have presented prototype solutions pursued during the Phase I activity. These solutions address critical wet lab operations including passive bubble/droplet mitigations. We expect to take many such solutions to flight fidelity during the Phase II to achieve ≥ TRL 6 with possibilities for ISS demonstrations in Phase III. We will compute, design, and fabricate new prototypes advancing such devices to flight fidelity. We will quantify device and process performance in relevant low-g environments (i.e., gravity-compensated terrestrial and drop tower tests). Such contributions directly support NASA’s Biological and Physical Sciences research and will prove invaluable to the cross-cutting microgravity (and Lunar) fluidics needs of NASA’s life support communities for research, development, and exploration.

Due to the broadly applicable cross-cutting nature of the low-g fluidics devices pursued in the Phase II, our customers are expected to include government and commercial entities including NASA who would be an immediate and direct customer as it relates to science aboard spacecraft. We also expect commercial spaceflight operators to utilize the technology for similar needs. Medical and biological researchers are expected to provide the largest supply of customers as space station access becomes more affordable, routine, and reliable.  The novelty of our design approach is its nearly singular application to the low-g environment. Though we do pursue omni-gravitational solutions, our true niche is where the impact of gravity is quite small. However, we nonetheless pursue terrestrial applications for our material, filters, and design methods finding applications in microfluidics, biofluidics, OOC, LOC, and POC diagnostics.

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