International Space Station

HotDog Patient Warming is used in outer space aboard the International Space Station. Learn why HotDog meets the unique challenges in a micro-gravity environment and how that applies to patient temperature management on earth!

For more about the strange thermal challenges of life in space, click the link below for an excellent article by NASA: Staying Cool on the ISS

Transcript

HotDog’s in outer space? Far out! Just this previous summer HotDog Patient Warming became the only patient warming system trusted by NASA as it lifted off on the SPX 25 Dragon launch vehicle and headed to the International Space Station. It was a very exciting time for us as a company. Although the intergalactic market for patient warming isn’t substantial at this time, we’re still quite excited to be the only patient warming system trusted by NASA.

The due diligence that they use for getting any piece of equipment on their  capsule is pretty substantial as you can imagine. And I kind of viewed it as sort of like The Right Stuff, but a little bit nerdier than that awesome movie.

But, nevertheless, we ended up on the Space Station for some experiments, and you might ask yourself why? Why would NASA want HotDog Patient Warming on the International Space Station? Why would they want air-free HotDog Patient Warming? And that is the the key right there.

So I’ll give  you a quote from NASA that might be a clue. Quote, “It is indeed a strange New World on the ISS. Hot air that doesn’t rise, heat that doesn’t conduct,  radiators too cold for liquid water… it’s enough to give a thermal engineer gray hairs!” That’s from NASA’s article Staying Cool on the ISS from 2001. So convection does not work in outer space  at least not in the way that you would expect.  

Now on Earth hot air displaces cold air and becomes less dense, and because it’s less dense the force of gravity is able to pull that cold air down and hot air rises.

Alright so we experience hot air rising and you don’t have to be  Mr. Joshua to know that hot air in fact does rise.

Now the International Space Station actually has a condition called microgravity. We would probably commonly call it zero gravity, but it’s actually a little bit more complicated than that. But in a microgravity environment Hot Air does not convect in the same way that we would think of on Earth. It just sort of sits there and  builds up and gets hotter and hotter and hotter.

So you can imagine with a forced air system if that were on the International Space Station that would it would effectively build up heat  build up heat build up heat and the heat wouldn’t be dissipating, it wouldn’t be convecting. Also the ability to transfer heat becomes screwed up with convection in outer space.

However, HotDog luckily does not use blowing hot air. Instead, it uses radiant and conductive heat transfer and  that’s just ideal for the International Space Station. It’s also a much lower energy usage and and that was quite appealing.

We’ll show you in future videos how forced air  warming on Earth, actually the hot air does rise and how it is able to contaminate the surgical  field. Furthermore, how the thinking of the forced-air manufacturers that the hot air does not rise.

Now that you know this detail about patient warming in outer space–you might  think that the the forced air manufacturers  
are are kind of “far out” in the  way that they’re approaching that. 

For more about the strange thermal challenges that NASA faces on the International Space Station click on the link in the description below and there’s a great article that might be eye-opening. How does NASA stay cool on the ISS?

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