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Spaceflight Payload Design, Flight Experience G-408, William W. Durgin, Fred J. Looft, Albert Sacco, Jr., Robert Thompson, Anthony G. Dixon, Dino Roberti, Robert Labonte, Larry Moschini

Office of the Provost Scholarship

Worcester Polytechnic Institute's first payload of spaceflight experiments flew aboard Columbia, STS-40, during June of 1991 and culminated eight years of work by students and faculty. The Get Away Special (GAS) payload was installed on the GAS bridge assembly at the aft end of the cargo bay behind the Spacelab Life Sciences (SLS-l) laboratory. The experiments were turned on by astronaut signal after reaching orbit and then functioned for 72 hours. Environmental and experimental measurements were recorded on three cassette tapes which, together with zeolite crystals grown on orbit, formed the basis of subsequent analyses.

The experiments were developed over …

Analysis Of Natural Convection In A Low Gravity Environment, Ethan Mattor, William W. Durgin, Peter Blonznalis, Richard Schoenberg

Office of the Provost Scholarship

Natural convection inside a spherical container was studied experimentally with two apparatuses at low buoyancy levels. The data generated by these experiments, plotted nondimensionally as the Nusselt versus Rayleigh numbers, gives correlations for Rayleigh numbers between 10³ and 10⁸, a range which was previously untested. These results show that natural convection has significant effects at a Rayleigh number of 10>sup>3 and higher, although the behavior of the Nusselt number as the conduction limit is approached is still unknown for a spherical geometry.