lundi 11 juillet 2011

STS 135 : un nouveau système simple pour recycler l’urine en eau

Monica R.Soler et Howard Levine avec un kit
baptisé Osmotic Bag. Simple et pratique, il permet
de sac-Ă -sac de convertir l'urine en eau. Euhhhh....
Le liquide bleu, c'est pour les besoins de l'expérience.
Photos : rke
[ Cape Canaveral, July 10th 2011, © rke, english below ] – A Cap Canaveral, la NASA nous a prĂ©sentĂ©, dans la salle TV, un kit manuel qui peut convertir de l’urine en eau potable. Les soldats amĂ©ricains utilisent dĂ©jĂ  cette technologie similaire pour filtrer les parasites, les bactĂ©ries, les virus et autres contaminants fluides sales, y compris l’urine. De plus, les astronautes de la Station spatiale internationale (ISS) peuvent dĂ©jĂ  boire de l’eau d’une machine de recyclage baptisĂ©e pee-recycling, mais son approvisionnement est limitĂ©. Le kit prĂ©sentĂ© est d’un fonctionnement beaucoup plus simple, car il n’a pas besoin d’alimentation externe. Le système a Ă©tĂ© mis au point par la sociĂ©tĂ© Bionetics Corporation (www.bionetics.com) et sera utilisĂ© ces prochains jours par les astronautes d’Atlantis.
A lire en détail dans un prochain numéro de Swiss Engineering-RTS.

The Osmotic Bag
The key to NASA's recycler
is a bag-within-bag.
The blue liquid is a
potassium-rich
solution made to test the
experiment's
filtration abilities.
STS 135: a new way to convert urine into drinkable
A textbook-sized kit that can convert urine into drinkable water accompagne NASA's the actually space shuttle mission Atlantis in the space.  Soldiers already use similar technology to filter out parasites, bacteria, viruses and other contaminants from dirty fluids, including urine, but NASA's adapted baggie system has yet to prove itself in space.
« This could be a first step toward recapturing the humidity from our sweat, from our breath, even from our urine, and recycling it and making it drinkable », said NASA project scientist and experiment leader Howard Levine, who made a reference to water-recycling "stillsuits" used on a desert world in the science fiction series Dune.
A Houston, j'ai découvert
les toilettes telles
qu'elles sont dans la
Station spatiale internationale
ISS. Mais je ne les
ai pas essayées. Photos : rke
Astronauts aboard the International Space Station already drink water from a pee-recycling machine delivered several years ago, but it saps power from the orbital laboratory's limited supply. The space-ready water conversion kit, however, won't need an external power source because it relies on a passive property of fluids called forward osmosis.
NASA's recycler will use a sugary solution injected into a semi-permeable inner bag, which is nested inside an outer bag. Dirty fluid that's pumped into the outer bag will slowly pass through the inner bag and into the sugary solution, leaving behind its contaminants. On Earth, the double-sack system makes about a liter of sports drink-like fluid in four to six hours.
One of the four astronauts aboard space shuttle Atlantis will test the recycler — with an experimental fluid, not their own urine.
Following in a next Swiss Engineering-RTS magazine.