Re: How does the Liquid Cooling and Vent Garment work?

Hi Carly,

The Liquid Cooling and Ventilation Garment (LCVG) is basically just "long underwear" with small tubes sewn into the fabric. The astronaut wears this as the first layer when putting on a space suit (so the tubes touch the skin). All of the tubes come together at two points: one where the water comes in and one where it leaves. When the astronaut puts the rest of the spacesuit on, they connect those two points to the backpack of the spacesuit.

Inside the backpack are batteries, a pump, a sublimator, and some valves (among several other systems like a radio, oxygen, etc.). The pump moves water from the backpack into the LCVG. In the LCVG, the water picks up heat from the astronaut's body and then it flows back into the backpack. In the backpack, the water flows through a cooling unit called a "sublimator" which cools the water before it's pumped back into the LCVG. This process is shown in the following page:

http:// paperairplane.mit.edu/16.423J/Space/SBE/projects/LSSWEBSITE/Pages/emu_ltc.htm

The sublimator works by evaporating some of the feed water to space. Some more detail on the sublimator can be found here:

http://www.hsssi.com/ComponentSolutions/ Subliminators/emu_subliminator.html

If you are interested in how the rest of the spacesuit works, I would suggest reading this page:

http:// science.howstuffworks.com/space-suit.htm

I hope this helps you understand what's going on with the LVCG. The entire spacesuit is quite an amazing piece of equipment!

-Steve