Vented Tank Resupply Experiment - Flight test results

The Capillary Flow Experiments: Handheld Fluids Experiments for International Space Station

“…The Concus-Finn critical wetting condition 5,6 is eliminated and/or significantly altered for interior corners that do not actually contact; such as in the gap formed by a vane and tank wall of a large propellant storage tank (a commonality in practice), or the near intersection of vanes in a tank with complex vane network 7 . Two CFE flight units are proposed to investigate this phenomenon using a right cylinder with elliptic cross section and a single central vane that does not contact the container walls as depicted in Fig.…”

Cryogenic fluid transfer for exploration

“…Nevertheless the Progress module includes resupply tanks holding about 870 kg of propellant (two tanks of nitrogen tetroxide and two of UDMH hydrazine). This module and system were first used on Saylut 6 on January 20,1978 10), which looked at a vane device to separate gas and liquid during transfer. Figure 2 shows inflow into one of the VTRE tanks during a fluid transfer.…”

Low Gravity Issues of Deep Space Refueling

“…Notable experiments include: Storable Fluid Management Device (SFMD)/Fluid Acquisition and Resupply Experiment (FARE), which used a common set of hardware to explore several different transfer schemes; [14][15][16][17] Tank Pressure Control Experiment (TPCE), [18][19][20][21][22] which examined pressure control and tank mixing; and Vented Tank Resupply Experiment (VTRE), 23 which looked at a vane device to separate gas and liquid during transfer. The super fluid on-orbit transfer (SHOOT) flight demonstration, 24 was very successful in moving superfluid helium from tank to tank on-orbit.…”