What a TEASE

[hatman]

Not sure if anyone noticed, but I haven't been 'round the board too much in the last, oh, I don't know, year or so. Been spread pretty thin around the workplace. But some of my most pressing hardware has shipped (one item 3 days early, and ond one 3 years late... the rest somewhere in the middle... I call that a pretty good average). And so I've been gradually working back into the board again, over the last couple of weeks. Until yesterday (DOH) my boss let's us know that one of the experienced engineers in the group is going out to our Long Beach office to help THEM out for a few months... leaving me to split his workload with the newbie.

And on the homefront, you can congratulate me (I think). We are expecting our Third come this Christmas. While certain family members are pulling for Jesus, if it's a boy, I'm partial to Levon... or even Ender. Just Kidding (about the name thing, not the pregnancy, that's real). Anyway, back to the grind.

 

[Greg Truby]

I had noticed your absence and had wondered what you’d been up to lately. Unfortunately, I too have been scarce around these parts. Our CS team has gone from 23 to 12, i.e. about a 48% loss of manpower, but sales are actually up. So all of us that used to plan for the future are now having to roll up our sleeves and do front-line CS work in order to provide same-day responses to customer issues. The number of e-mails hitting my inbox is up about six- or sevenfold.

OK, back to the trenches for me, too. Looks like two new e-mails showed up while I was writing this post… *sigh*

edit -- DOH! Congratulations on the coming bundle of joy!

 

[hatman]

Yeah, I hear your manpower situation. The truth about our actual manpower situation is actually much worse than I implied... we have 3 mechanical engineers right now, working with product... of which one is still VERY new. So our loss of one is a 33% reduction. Plus the spares contract that we are just getting rolling on has about 100 replacement components, versus the 30 we have built to date, with a commit date that's about twice as optimistic (2 years for qty 100 instead of 5 years for qty 30). Of course, management figures we know what we are doing now, so we can do it faster better cheaper and with fewer resources and less manpower.

Thanx for the congrats.

 

[Mark O'Brien]

(one item 3 days early, and ond one 3 years late...

Was the pee recycler one of those projects?

 

[hatman]

Was the pee recycler one of those projects?

I'm impressed that you got so close with so few facts.

Not exactly. While I work on components for the Water Processor, which makes drinking water from the output of the Urine Processor, the Water Processor, as a prototype, shipped from our plant almost 5 years ago. While my company shipped to our customer on-time, that system integrator, who designed/built the Urine Procesor and provided the entire system to Nasa, did so almost 3 years late.

Right now, we are hip deep in making spare parts for the Water Processor. The components of the WPA that I am responsible for have more or less shipped around their contract date... so far. I'm a little concerned about some of the more complex stuff coming up.

The component that shipped three years late was a spare part of the Oxygen Generator that contains the Electrolytic Cell Stack and Rotary Phase Separator.

 

[Mark O'Brien]

The component that shipped three years late was a spare part of the Oxygen Generator that contains the Electrolytic Cell Stack and Rotary Phase Separator.

When the hydrogen is separated, what is it used for?

So with the system integrator being 3 years late, what did they do in the meantime?

 

[snowblizz]

When the hydrogen is separated, what is it used for?

So with the system integrator being 3 years late, what did they do in the meantime?

Duct-tape and prayers I imagine.

 

[hatman]

When the hydrogen is separated, what is it used for?

For now, it's just vented overboard. We are also working on a carbon reduction system that takes CO2 that's been scrubbed from the air, and catalyzes it with the Hydrogen to make more water, plus some waste methane that gets vented overboard. We've been working on this system (called the Sabtier Systemfor about 30 years now, and it is scheduled to ship in October of this year. This sytem closes the Regenerative Environmental Control & Life Support System (Regen ECLSS) loop.

So with the system integrator being 3 years late, what did they do in the meantime?

They shipped up bags of water. Of course, it costs between $12,000 and $20,000 per pound to ship anything to the ISS, so a gallon of water costs about $100,000. The Regen ECLSS system is the only hardware on station that will theoreticaly pay for itself. It's a VERY expensive system, but it will be completely paid off in a handful of missions.

 

[Mark O'Brien]

For now, it's just vented overboard. We are also working on a carbon reduction system that takes CO2 that's been scrubbed from the air, and catalyzes it with the Hydrogen to make more water, plus some waste methane that gets vented overboard. We've been working on this system (called the Sabtier Systemfor about 30 years now, and it is scheduled to ship in October of this year. This sytem closes the Regenerative Environmental Control & Life Support System (Regen ECLSS) loop.

Cool thanks for the information on that. I figured it was probably probably just vented, but I was wondering if there was a way to reuse it for water. I could continue to ask questions forever on this, but I'll try to make these my last.

If some waste methane is vented then does that become the only place where hydrgogen is expelled thus representing a loss in hydrogen available to regenerate water? Given that, what type of water recovery would be expected from the Sabtier System?

 

[hatman]

Oops, I typoed: The System is Sabatier (after the French Nobel Proze winner who came up with the Hydrogenization process).

Aside from the Carbon, there is a water loss from the loop within the Methane. The information I have come across indicates that the theoretical water recovery efficiency for the system is 93%. Howvwe, these numbers were derived about a decade ago, and are burind in the intial project proposal. I do not believe that this accounts for the residual water that cannot be pulled from the urine in the UPA... if ALL of the water is removed, then the resulting crystal structure can't be removed without chiselling it out. Again, our customer designed and built teh UPA, but I am pretty sure that some sort of syrupy slurry is left over from the evaporation process, which is then disposed of, implying that there is still a high water conent. Since the unit runs batch-wise, I am not sure how many batches it processes before the slurry is dicarded. However, I believe that the amount of makeup water needed to keep the total water content of the "loop" is on the order of magnitude of gallons per month, rathe rthan the previous usage of gallons per day for a ful crew. Some buzz-terms I have heard around here over the years suggested that the amount of moisture in the food was enough to make up for systemic water loss, but I think that is probably overly ambitious in the actual implementation.

While it's possible to break down to the methane further to get the Hydrogen back, I am not aware of any research in that area.

Feel free to ask questions. It's what I do on a daily basis, and it's pretty cool.