We developed a new functional concept that provides the opportunity for astronauts to shower in micro-gravity on long-term missions.

Past whole body cleansing methods were not fully satisfying for the astronauts and cosmonauts. According to the conducted interviews and previous data, a new system should not impose on the safety of the spacecraft, should be easy to use, not very time consuming, comfortable, and should be hygienic if used by multiple people.

By designing our whole body cleansing system, the “Evolon Shower”, we implemented the following features to meet those requirements:

• To keep the system safe we are using an acrylic glass cabin that is sealed once the astronaut is inside. By coating the inside of our shower with a superhydrophobic surface that uses the Lotus-Effect, we expect that water as well as dirt will not stick to the surface so that the inside of the cabin will not have to be dried manually by the astronaut.
• We added a vacuum pump to move airflow towards the bottom by sucking air and water out of the cabin. We expect that there will not be any free floating water inside the cabin. This would increase the comfort for the astronaut and would have a positive psychological effect by giving him the feeling of an Earth-like shower.
• An additional heated air system that dries the astronaut and the inside of the cabin after showering like an electric hand drier has the purpose of making manual drying methods unnecessary.

Several concepts have been published concerning whole body cleansing in microgravity but none of them with the combination of these three methods. Superhydrophobic surfaces being a very recent discovery are just about to come on the market for general applications and have therefore never been tested in microgravity before. The experiments that we will conduct on the parabolic flight will help to proof the efficiency of our system on a smaller scale and to understand the interactions of fluids in microgravity. The results can be used as input into the design of a full scale “Lotus Shower” that might be tested with humans in other parabolic flight experiments and perhaps space. Successful completion of tests on the full scale model will provide a new system that satisfies the needs of a whole body cleansing system for use in long-duration human missions in the future.

The test flight model

To verify these features and the efficiency of our system we were granted the opportunity to fly a 1:3 model on the 2005 ESA Parabolic Flight Campaign.