Introduction:
Biomedical experiments in microgravity provide an 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 time-consuming. For this reason, so-called Random Positioning Machines (RPM) are used to simulate weightlessness for preparation and post-processing, whereby the samples are rotated around two orthogonal axes over a longer period of time. Typically, the samples are held in a cell culture bottle filled with nutrient solution. In an earlier study, the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts was able to demonstrate that the influence of fluid dynamics in the cell culture flask was underestimated. However, there have not yet been any studies on the influence of the size and geometry of the cell culture flask. This will be investigated in this master thesis.
Project objective:
The simulation model is to be expanded on the basis of the previous work. In a first step, the influence of the bottle size is to be investigated. In a second step, the influence of the (simplified) geometry of conventional commercial cell culture bottles is to be investigated.
In this work
- you will learn about fluid dynamics simulation (CFD) in the ANSYS software
- you will learn how to create a study design
- you will be able to plan and structure projects
- you gain an insight into space biology
The work is carried out in collaboration with Ernesto Casartelli from the Institute of Mechanical and Energy Engineering (CC Fluid Mechanics and Numerical Methods) and Simon Wüest from the Institute of Medical Engineering.
