The ISS water recycling system.

With a glass of water costing about $4400 on the International Space Station, it was just a matter of time before a way was found to to drink that water more than once. But it's not just about cost. On a long journey to Mars, it about the availability.
In this episode of Celestial Sphere we take a detailed look at the devices to turn Urine in to drinkable water.
ENJOY AND THANKS FOR WATCHING.
Please checkout out our android space simulator app called Curiosity. It's lets you send spacecraft to all of the inner planets of the solar system from earth.
It also lets you land the Curiosity rover on Mars going through the 7-Minutes of Terror.
play.google.com/store/apps/de...
MUSIC CREDIT
Snowflake - Longing (Base Mode pres. Lunar Chillout Mix) by Lunar (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. dig.ccmixter.org/files/lunarmu...
Opening music by Evan Boyerman
Between Worlds (Instrumental) by Aussens@iter (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. dig.ccmixter.org/files/tobias_... Ft: (Smiling Cynic)
SOURCES
www.nasa.gov/pdf/395963main_t...
ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/2...
ttu-ir.tdl.org/bitstream/hand...
ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/2...

[@ReflectiveLayerFilm]

Addendum: 8:24 - all of the small gear pumps should be rotating in the opposite direction. Thanks to viewer CalMariner for bringing this to my attention. 9:27 - I couldn't find the exact inner workings of the Gas Separator used in the recycling system. The one in the animation shows the operating principal but not necessarily the mechanism. Thanks for watching!

[@AnupamVipul]

Great work I always though its just a fancy multi-stage RO purifier

[@keejefferys2372]

Great info, cool to see the optimizations they use to squeeze extra efficiency out, I enjoy these indepth videos about the functions onboard the ISS

[@ReflectiveLayerFilm]

Great to hear and thanks for watching.

[@lukej4789]

This is great. Thank you!

[@CalMariner]

Tis is an amazingly detailed explanation. Thank you for sharing this with us - you must have spent so many hours getting it just right.

[@ReflectiveLayerFilm]

Glad you enjoyed it! Initial I was just going to present the components as blocks without going inside of each. But after doing the animation for the evaporator I thought it would be cool to do it for all of them, and that cost be a month. But it was fun to do.

[@rozinaakter7147]

Pleasure to know

[@LearningCurveScience]

Awesome video and definitely worth the wait. Your animations are always very easy to follow and well explained. It's interesting to think that the ISS deals with water in a similar way to how we do here on earth, just on a smaller scale, but a lot of the processes are similar. Excellent ideas of efficiency and ingeniously getting round the problems of micro gravity. Superb work as always.

[@ReflectiveLayerFilm]

Thanks a ton! I was impressed by the use of partial vacuum to cause the water to evaporate instead of generating heat. Interestingly the Russians don't recycle their urine but they recycle the other forms of used water like water vapor in the air. Because of this, astronauts in the US section will occasionally take the Russian urine bags to extract the water from them in the US section when needed. www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2015/08/27/why-american-astronauts-drink-russian-urine/

[@leticiaflores1318]

Thx you for the vid it was great❤

[@bruhbroseph]

That was excellent!

[@chrisrigoni]

Thank You 🙏✌️

[@balajimundhe6102]

Thank you.

[@therocinante3443]

Your videos are so dang good!

[@ReflectiveLayerFilm]

Thanks for the nice comment.

[@MrScienceTamil]

Awesome explain bro...

[@theperfectbotsteve4916]

Idk why but I was expecting him to say fire lol

[@imperialzealot2939]

Method in the Madness.

[@tiavor]

knowing nothing about this, I expected to see a reverse osmosis at some point. but I don't know how long it lasts.

[@AttilaTheHun333333]

Your videos are really good, but you really need better audio so your voice gets more crisp and understandable. Even a cheap mic can do wonders.

[@dwangnoderbora]

These videos are so competent! What do you do for your career?

[@ReflectiveLayerFilm]

Mobile App development

[@johnodonoghue651]

Food is mostly transformed into CO2 and H20.

[@CalMariner]

Not sure if you're interested in such feedback, but I noticed that the gear pump graphics you used are actually rotating in the wrong direction. I know, it totally looks like they would rotate that way, but it's actually the opposite. The fluid path is around the outside of the pump, and not between the rollers. Hopefully this helps, am just hoping to share info out of gratitude for the wonderful way you have shared info. If you feel like this feedback is not welcome or comes off as criticizing, please know that is not how it is meant, and I welcome you to delete it or I can. Thank you for continuing to make such amazing content!

[@ReflectiveLayerFilm]

No at all, criticism is always welcomed and I really appreciate you taking the time to point out errors in the video. I'm all about trying to get little details correct. And yes you are correct about the fluid flow. The parts where the gears touch is always suppose to be in contact forming a seal while the fluid flowed on the outside. I thought about the oddness of the animation for the pump. Unfortunately that's all I did. :-)

[@CalMariner]

@@ReflectiveLayerFilm no worries at all. There's always a fair arguement to be made that the rotation "with" the flow, while incorrect, communicates the function more clearly to the average viewer.

[@CalMariner]

@@ReflectiveLayerFilm also "all you did" - such an understatement! You clearly did a TON of careful work here, especially with the particle simulations. Not just fluid flow, but transformations like within the catalyst bed - very nice!

[@jesuzbo.]

Why is the channel name different from the intro 🤔

[@ReflectiveLayerFilm]

The Intro is the name for the series the video belongs to. There are currently 4. 1)Something ain't Right 2)Celestial Sphere 3)Sensing the Universe 4)Aiming for the Stars

[@jesuzbo.]

Ohhh now i get keep up the hard work though cus you are going higher i really love what you do on your channel it helps curios minds like our learn new things and gives us inspiration to innovative better ideas ♥️

[@imperialzealot2939]

Also can a humble Brazilian ask you some questions sir? Titan, one of the Saturn's moons, have large bodies of liquid natural gas, do you think that due to geological processes it have petroleum too? If so what are the political and economical consequences of it? Does you can think of any other place out side of the earth that have something similar to petroleum? Liquid natural gas can be made into polyethylene that contains a high concentration of hydrogen, making it in great quantities a gamma radiation absorbent material, so is it possible to make a rocket almost entirely out of plastic, so we can reuse its second stage as an space station?

[@ReflectiveLayerFilm]

Interesting point. There are two main issues with exploiting the resources on Titan. The first has to do with extraction. We have to invent methods of extracting these hydrocarbons in a very hostile environment. Second, it's going to require a lot of energy to transport materials/equipment between Titan and Earth. These two issue will make anything we bring back to Earth from Titan very expensive. And I think for the added expense we could look deeper into the earth to find more hydrocarbons. With that said. If we make use of those hydrocarbons by building structures on Titan then it might work. We haven't even colonize Mars yet so that's gonna be a while. As for political and economical consequences, when getting these resources becomes viable it will be the same thing that happens on earth. Claims will be made and fights will break out. We just can help ourselves. That's what we do.

[@imperialzealot2939]

​@@ReflectiveLayerFilm Thanks for answering, your videos are like doing faculty, except that it's free, fun and you actually learn something.

[@Muonium1]

H is a neutron shield, not gamma. The plastic would shield gamma rays to a certain extent due to density, but the real value is in the inelastic scattering and moderating/absorbing capabilities of a borated or cadmium doped H rich material like polyethylene.

[@imperialzealot2939]

@@Muonium1 well that is cool.

[@Muonium1]

It's a very remarkable and complex system. I am indeed impressed with it and its apparent high reliability, but I have to wonder if simply brute forcing the thing might be less complex, more efficient, easier, and better in the long term for truly deep space missions. The brine waste, the multifiltration beds, the brine filter canister, and the particulate filter, they all contribute to either water lost from the recovery process, or use of non-reusable consumable parts that will be very serious single point failures on a long duration mission. I have to believe it would be better, instead of filter and concentrate both the brine and product water, to simply destroy and recreate it. ie. take the urine directly and distill off most of the easily separated and pure water (volatiles can be converted to co2 with the same catalytic reactor assembly noted in the video), then take the concentrate and heat it to several thousand degrees, maybe even above the dissociation temperature of water. Then just process the resulting co2 normally and react the H and O to reform ultrapure water. The only waste product being a very small amount of totally sterile simple salts like calcium and sodium chloride that could be used either directly as electrolytes in drink or seasoning on food, or indirectly as fertilizer micronutrients for a greenhouse. This would surely recover 99+% of water and have the added benefit of recovering oxygen from metabolic waste of food via co2 cracking. The only complications I imagine arising from such a system would be the recovery of the sulfur component of the furnace gas output, and the higher energy required for high temperature furnace processing of the brine.

[@ReflectiveLayerFilm]

I like that idea. It's definitely simpler to operate. And yeah I was also thinking about the tremendous amount of energy required but also the potential danger of haven something that hot and large in or near the crew compartment.

[@ronaldtartaglia4459]

God i HATE the metric system