Purdue's Condensed Droplet Experiment for NASA in Sub-Orbital Spaceflight (ConDENSS) experiment was chosen by NASA's Flight Opportunities Program for sub-orbital flight testing on a future Blue Origin New Shepard sub-orbital mission. ConDENSS seeks to test several predictions of existence and stability of static capillary droplets, plugs, and annular sleeves predicted by computational modeling. Application of the results includes advancing zero-gravity condenser technology and several possible applications on Earth.

The payload is designed to form droplets, plugs, and sleeves of liquid by pumping pre-determined volumes of the liquid onto the walls of elliptical cone test sections. Four test sections with a static gas and four test sections with flowing gas are to be flown in one mission. The gas flow simulates conditions in the condenser Section of a phase-change heat transfer loop in spaceflight. Observations, collected by cameras throughout the payload, are to be compared with predictions from zero-gravity numerical modeling to validate or refute the zero-gravity fluids simulations.

This work is partially supported by NASA Grant NNX16AP69G from the Flight Opportunities Program in STMD.