Introduction:
Biomedical experiments in microgravity allow insight into the fundamental mechanisms of living cells. Not only astronauts benefit from this research, but also terrestrial medicine. However, access to space is still very expensive and complex. For this reason, so-called Random Positioning Machines (RPM), among others, are used to simulate weightlessness for the pre- and post-processing. In this process, the samples are rotated around two orthogonal axes for a longer period of time. Typically, the samples are held in a cell culture bottle filled with nutrient solution. The Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts was able to demonstrate in a previous work that the influence of the fluid dynamics in the cell culture bottle was underestimated. However, there is no research yet on the influence of the size and geometry of the cell culture bottle. This will be investigated in this master thesis.
Project Objective:
Based on the previous work, the simulation model shall be extended. In a first step, the influence of the bottle size should be investigated. In a second step, the influence of the (simplified) geometry of common commercial cell culture bottles shall be investigated.
In this work
- you will get to know Fluid-Dynamic Simulationem (CFD) in the software ANSYS
- learn to create a study design
- you will be able to plan and structure projects
- get an insight into space biology
The work is done in collaboration with Ernesto Casartelli from the Institute of Mechanical and Power Engineering (CC Fluid Mechanics and Numerical Methods) and Simon Wüest from the Institute of Medical Engineering.
