The Spacesuit Water Membrane Evaporator (SWME) is a next-generation design to replace the sublimator in spacesuits for thermal control. The SWME design includes nearly 28,000 hollow fiber membranes epoxied into a titanium housing. Limited data is available to understand the risk of exposure of the SWME materials to nominal and off-nominal conditions including organic chemicals, inorganic chemicals, particulates, and microbes. This effort sought to empirically investigate the effects of changing membrane characteristics such as pore size, porosity, and surface energy on membrane performance and the effects of environmental conditions on those characteristics. Performance data is presented and the long-term impacts on SWME performance are discussed. Effects of broken fibers, epoxy breakthrough, crimped or crushed fibers, and changes in fiber surface energy are also explored.
Abney et al. (Sun,) studied this question.