• pool boiling
• microgravity

Microgravity allows several investigation and analysis most of the time hardly reproducible on ground environment. Natural phenomena are influenced by gravity that in some cases affects their duration. A clear example is the fluid dynamic that totally changes in a reduced gravity environment. Several fields of this science branch were analysed and are planned to be studied in the Fluid Science Lab installed in the Columbus Module of the International Space Station and one of this is the boiling phenomenon.
RUBI is a project proposed and prototyped by a wide science community were University of Pisa takes part, whereas it is developed, manufactured integrated and tested by Airbus Defence and Space. The objective of this experiment is to investigate boiling in order to optimize many ground and space technologies.
This thesis is a work developed in the frame of RUBI project focused on three main topic strictly connected one each other. The first one is the detailed study and description of the whole experiment considering the subsystems, their interactions and how the system engineering design has been developed according to the scientific proposals.
The second one concerns the functionality and performances investigation and test of the experiment container conducted in Airbus DS facilities followed by the results analysis. From this derives the third topic that is the development of test procedures and part of the experiment procedure.