 Hello everyone, this week I'm in Florida dealing with the heat while the International Space Station is dealing with heat in space. This is your space pod for September 21st, 2016. The Phase Change Heat Exchanger Project or Phase Change HX was installed on station by American astronaut Kate Rubens on September 14th. So what is a phase change? Well it's simply when a material turns from a solid to a liquid or from a liquid to a gas or a combination of those. In this particular experiment wax will be changing from a solid to a liquid and back again. Wax has previously been used on both the Apollo-Luna rovers and the Skylab Space Station with mixed results. It works by taking the heat from the environment using cooling loops and in this case the cooling loops are filled with water and antifreeze and that heat gets dumped into the wax block melting it from a solid to a liquid. This collected heat can then be dumped overboard using the station's onboard radiators and the wax goes from a liquid back to a solid again. The station radiators can only release so much heat at a time so the phase change system allows for that extra heat to be stored safely and easily until such time when the station radiators can be used to release the extra heat. This new system has cooling loops that can get as cold as minus 10 degrees centigrade. A capability the station previously has not had. Once plenty of data has been collected from the wax system through numerous cycles of freezing and melting the wax block will be swapped out for water. Water has the ability to absorb more heat for the same amount of wax because water has special bonds between the water molecules called hydrogen bonds that allow it to absorb more heat. However water expands when it freezes which could cause some problems for the machinery of this phase change system. Ultimately this technology demonstration will help us understand how both wax and water behave as heat exchangers in microgravity, helping us develop our technology for thermoregulation on future spacecraft such as Orion. And phase change heat exchanges are used down here on earth as well in places such as power plants and factories so the data that we collect up on station can be used to improve those systems down here on earth. Thanks for watching and I hope you enjoyed watching me swelter out here in the Florida heat. I'd also love to give a huge shout out to our Patreon patrons who help crowdfund to make these shows possible. I'd like to thank our founders, architects, engineers, ambassadors and dreamers of tomorrow and if you'd like more information on how you can help to crowdfund this show head over to patreon.com slash space pod. Don't forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel at youtube.com slash tmro and join in the conversation by following us on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and even our website tmro.tv. My name is Lisa Stodzianowski and until next time keep on discovering.