South Dakota Mines student and
faculty researchers have received $300,000 in grants from NASA to help model
microgravity in a rotating wall vessel and to comb the massive dataset gathered during a wide range of
experiments on the space station and the space shuttle.
“We take the old data that was gathered from
experiments in space, and we do new work on it,” says Travis Walker, Ph.D., associate
professor of chemical and biological engineering at South Dakota Mines. Members
of the Walker
Research Group are pouring over these older data sets with new
tools to provide novel insights that may benefit future space exploration
and/or scientific challenges on Earth. “What NASA really wants us to do is to
turn around and suggest the next generation of experiments on the space
station,” says Walker.
Walker and his research team study fundamental
physics of particles at very small scales. In 2017, he won a prestigious CAREER Award
from the National Science Foundation on new ways to manipulate the particle-laden fluids
inside 3D printing processes. This work led to the creation of several different
research projects. “Because we study fundamental physics, solving previous problems
has led us to all sorts of new applications,” says Walker. These applications
include everything from possible new delivery of cancer drugs and better
braking systems for automobiles to new ways to grow the beneficial microbes that
are needed for cutting edge biotechnology applications and much more.
The latest NASA funded research includes work with Mingyang
Tan, Ph.D., formerly a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at Mines who is
now at the University of Connecticut. Tan is examining data from a series of
experiments done in the space station in the 1990’s on particles that are suspended
in fluids. “It’s called suspension mechanics, and it’s in almost everything we
do in life. All the materials that you buy have particles in them, and those
particles change the properties of the fluid that suspend them,” says
Walker.
In previous work Tan suspended magnetically
responsive particles in a fluid and found magnetic fields can be used to
control the particles and change the properties of the liquid itself. “The
problem is that doing really precise experiments on how particles are suspended
in liquid on Earth is really hard, so some of the premiere experiments were
done on the space station,” says Walker. Joshua Adeniran, a Ph.D. student in
chemical and biological engineering, is continuing this work today as a member
of the Walker Research Group.
The tools that Walker and Tan are using to examine the
NASA suspension mechanics data are based on computer code that Tan wrote as
part of previous research on Walker’s NSF CAREER Award. “My work aims to add to
fundamental understanding of materials at different scales,” says Tan. Tan has
built his own computer models that can accurately mimic conditions in space and
provide insight to new potential experiments – the NASA data will help refine
these models. “We hope to be able to propose more particle shapes and more
magnetic properties for future experiments in space,” says Tan.
“Dr. Tan deserves all of the credit on this work,”
says Walker. “It’s all based on efforts dating back to his initial Ph.D. work
that led to my CAREER award,” says Walker. “Dr. Tan wrote this code, and although
big groups at major universities are utilizing similar codes, he created a
unique program that is now starting to bear fruit.”
Mines is one of many
universities across the country competing for NASA funded research projects
like this. Walker gives credit of this success to his team. “Caltech, MIT, Stanford and other major
universities have this level of computer coding and research,” says
Walker. “I’m lucky to have a large group
of students and researchers who could be successful at any major university in
the country,” he adds. “My success has been highly dependent on other
researchers and students like Dr. Tan.”