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Vapor Compression Refrigeration System For Cold Storage On Spacecrafts, Cai Stephen Rohleder, Kunal Bansal, Bryce Shaffer, Eckhard A. Groll

International Refrigeration and Air Conditioning Conference

NASA’s future missions involve sending astronauts back to the moon, and further. Challenges associated with this goal are not limited to the science involved with propelling these astronauts to their destination. Life support systems must also advance to improve astronaut health during their long flights in space. Currently, food consumed in space is processed to be shelf stable, and recent experiments have shown that nutrients of these shelf stable foods decay over time. Refrigeration storage for more nutritional food has remained undeveloped due to fluid flow and heat transfer management difficulties in microgravity. As part of a NASA SBIR Phase …