Self-Cleaning Seals for Harsh Environments Webinar
When: Tue, 1/21/2025 at 2:00 PM (Eastern Time)
Join us for a webinar on NASA Kennedy Space Center’s Self-Cleaning Seals, designed for optimal performance in harsh, dusty environments. In space exploration, seals for hatches, airlocks, and spacesuits must maintain low leak rates to ensure crew safety, but dust accumulation can significantly degrade their performance. NASA’s self-cleaning seals use electrodynamic dust shielding technology to actively repel dust, preventing wear and tear while ensuring continuous efficiency. These seals can operate in both continuous and period cleaning modes. They offer vast potential for applications beyond space, including industries like material handling, mining, and pharmaceutical manufacturing.
Discover how NASA’s self-cleaning seals could transform systems in space and on Earth. There will be a chance to ask questions and engage with the inventor.
For more information on this technology, please visit this page.
NASA is seeking to license this technology to industry partners. Please register to learn more about collaboration opportunities.
Dr. Aaron Olson is a physicist at NASA Kennedy Space Center in the Swamp Works Electrostatics and Surface Physics Laboratory. Dr. Olson works on lunar in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) and lunar dust mitigation technologies in support of the Artemis program. In 2023, Dr. Olson was named a Future Technology Leader by the Engineer’s Council. Aaron was born in Kikwit in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and was raised in Madison, WI. He earned a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering in 2012, completed his M.S. in Engineering Mechanics in May of 2014 and a Ph.D. in this same field in 2018 from the University of Wisconsin. During his undergraduate education, Aaron earned a minor in International Engineering from studying abroad at the Institut Supérieur de l'Aéronautique et de l'Espace in Toulouse, France. He designed elements of an inflatable habitat for a student team that won NASA’s 2011 Exploration Habitat (X-Hab) competition, geared toward building an expandable module for NASA’S Deep Space Habitat Prototype. Aaron was the president of the UW-Madison chapter of Students for the Exploration and Development of Space, participated in NASA’s Undergraduate Microgravity Research program and was also a crew member of the 110th Mars Desert Research Station Crew. As a graduate student, Dr. Olson was a NASA Space Technology Research Fellow and collaborated on lunar ISRU research with NASA Kennedy Space Center’s Swamp Works Lab. Dr. Olson was named one of the Forward under 40 award winners from the University of Wisconsin – Madison’s Alumni Association in 2020 for his work with NovoMoto, Inc., a for profit social enterprise he co-founded in 2015 to provide clean, renewable, and sustainable electricity to communities in the DRC.
