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The Cool Flames Experiment: Recent Results At Reduced And Partial Gravity, Michael R. Foster

Faculty Publications - Biomedical, Mechanical, and Civil Engineering

Cool flames at Earth (1g), Martian (0.38g), Lunar (0.18g) and reduced-gravity (10–2g) have been studied experimentally in a closed, unstirred, static reactor to better understand the role of natural convection and diffusive transport on the induction period(s), flame shape, flame propagation speed, pressure history and temperature profile. Natural convection is known to play an important role in all terrestrial, unstirred, static reactor cool flame and auto-ignition experiments when the Rayleigh number exceeds 600 [2,3,6]. At 1g, typical values of the Ra are 10^4-10^6.

In this paper, experimental results from static, unstirred reactor studies conducted at four different gravitational acceleration levels …