Page 86 - International Space Station Benefits for Humanity, 3rd edition.

coming up this year for a team at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology.”
Said Boling of working with NASA, “The payload Increasing numbers of companies
that eventually became MVP started out as a Small are taking research to microgravity;
Business Innovative Research proposal.” After 7 years
and several phases of development, investment and however, spaceflight has been part
product improvement, Techshot was able to secure of R&D at Procter & Gamble (P&G)
six research campaigns to get MVP started. for almost a decade.
These campaigns include research from industry
and academia, and two additional investigations
for NASA in 2019.

liquid—are found in products ranging from milk
Mixing Up Better Products to fabric softener.
in Microgravity These products depend on the stability of such
Consumers want products that last, are easy to use, mixtures, particularly polydisperse mixtures, or those
and perform as promised. To provide these products, with particles of different sizes in suspension. Studying
companies sometimes take research to a higher level— how these mixtures move and break down helps
as in LEO aboard the ISS. product designers and manufacturers create
better, longer-lasting products that maintain
Increasing numbers of companies are taking research
to microgravity; however, spaceflight has been part of all their desired features.
R&D at Procter & Gamble (P&G) for almost a decade. “In simplest terms, we are trying to develop ways to
In partnership with NASA, the ISS National Laboratory, formulate together otherwise incompatible ingredients,”
Harvard University, Case Western Research and explained Matthew Lynch, P&G principal scientist.
ZIN Technologies, P&G has conducted a series of “We do this with the structured fluid approach—
investigations in microgravity of how gas and liquid creating microstructures in the fluid that keep these
phases form microstructures and how these structures ingredients together to ensure the same great
change over time. The studies, collectively known as performance from first to last use. In products that
the Advanced Colloids Experiment (ACE), use blends contain incompatible ingredients, structured fluids
of colloidal particles as proxies for commercial materials. keep them from separating—for example, cream
Colloids—suspensions of microscopic particles in a on top of milk.”
Shampoo, for example, must flow out of the bottle like
a liquid when used; however, in transport and on a
shelf, the solution needs to behave almost like a solid,
with droplets of active materials remaining evenly
dispersed. “We need to get the interactions just right to
meet both sets of conditions,” said Lynch. “Experiments
in microgravity allow us to ask basic science questions
about how these mixtures behave and will eventually
have a tangible effect on consumer products.”
The microgravity environment is key because, on Earth,
gravity causes heavy particles to sink and lighter ones
to float almost immediately. That makes it difficult to
understand what is happening and why.
About two-thirds of P&G’s biggest brands could
benefit. Downy fabric softener alone has sales of about
$4 billion a year, so a mere 1% savings in production
The Light Microscopy Module is configured for
ACE-T-1 experiment. costs, getting to market faster, or a slightly longer shelf
life provides significant return on investment. P&G
Image credit: NASA
spends millions of dollars a year on research to
address product shelf-life problems.

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