An LSU chemistry professor’s research skyrocketed to new heights Sunday aboard Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin’s suborbital space flight.
Chemistry Professor John Pojman and his collaborators at William Jewell College in Liberty, Missouri, designed and conducted an experiment testing the physics of how fluids move between each other.
It reveals how fluids with different compositions will move and interact when they come into contact with one another.
It’s already understood that two separate miscible fluids, such as oil and water, experience fluid flow at their boundary when changes in temperature or gradients in their concentration are applied, the university explains in a news release. But it’s unclear whether miscible fluids that dissolve into each other undergo a similar process.
“There’s no way on Earth we could do this experiment because gravity interferes with fluid dynamics,” Pojman says in the statement. “It’s exciting to finally be able to test a theory that’s over 100 years old.”
LSU was one of three universities, including Purdue University in Indiana and Braunschweig University of Technology in Germany, chosen to have an experiment aboard the flight.
For his experiment, Pojman and his collaborators built a system applying ultraviolet light to a monomer called dodecyl acrylate, which causes the monomer to convert into a viscous fluid.
Tiny particles are then dispersed throughout the monomer while a laser light illuminates them in a plane. A camera records what happens during the three minutes of weightlessness.
The results may reveal insights into the fluid dynamics of how magma from volcanic lava flows as it moves over thousands of miles and how materials need to be processed in space.
“This is also exciting because this experiment combines my love of space and astronomy with chemistry,” Pojman said.
Blue Origin aims to be a pioneer for space tourism. Its New Shepard rocket became the first rocket to fly to space and return to Earth via vertical landing in November 2015. The company wants to pioneer space tourism by offering paying customers a ride to what’s known as suborbital space, reaching about 62 miles above Earth’s surface. It plans to make the first trip with passengers in about two years.
