A new facility for fluid sciences: The liquid structure facility

Abstract The Liquid Structure Facility (LSF) is presently under development under ESA contract. It will be able to perform a wide range of fluid science experiments taking use of the determination of the velocity, temperature, concentration fields and the interface shape deformation. This facility will be activated by telecommands and/or manually by the crew. The key points of the LSF are the different diagnostic configuration capabilities, the modularity of the facility, and the accuracy of the control at the boundary conditions (and thus of the stimuli). The LSF is structured around four different modules: • —the cell module which is exchangeable and is dedicated to an experiment or to a group of experiments, it allows to achieve a high accuracy level for the boundary conditions • —the temperature control module using a liquid cooling loop which can impose a good thermal stability to the cell module • —the diagnostic module • —the electronic and data handling module. The capabilities of the facility are described in terms of stimuli and diagnostic performances.