The Angular Liquid Bridge Experiment is a glovebox investigation that will be conducted on the Russian Mir Space Station . The objective of the ALB is to observe the behavior of fluids under reduced gravity, in certain configurations for which striking behavior has been predicted mathematically. Specific configurations to be studied are those between parallel and tilted plates, for which fluid is predicted to shift discontinnuously with respect to small changes in plate tilt or contact angle.
ALB hardware consists of two test vessels and a parts box.
The ALB vessel is used to test the mathmatical results on equilibrium liquid bridges between two plates. The hinged door and the movable plate can be replaced to perform several different tests. The ALB Movable Wedge vessel is a reflight hardware from USML-2. This vessel is designed to study the possible effect of advancing and receding three-phase contact line on fluid behavior in a wedge, as the interior wedge angle is varied. The experiment was conceived and developed by Paul Concus of Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and the University of California at Berkeley, Robert Finn of Stanford University, and Mark Weislogel of NASA Lewis Research Center.