Abstract: Cylindrical Fire Experiments (CYLFire)
Subrata (Sooby) Bhattacharjee
Mechanical Engineering Department		 Parent Page
Fire safety is an important aspect of space travel. In the absence of gravity, fires inside a spacecraft, however, may behave quite differently than the fires on earth, which are dominated by buoyancy induced flows.

To understand how fuel geometry affects the flame propagation over solid fuels, experiments are conducted in drop-towers, in airplanes executing parabolic trajectories, in the Mir Space Station, and in the Space Shuttles. In some of these experiments we ignite cylindrical fuel sample at one end, and observe how fast the flame spreads along it under different ambient conditions and fuel geometry. These experimental results are compared with the prediction of an elaborate computational model and a simplified theory we have proposed to explain the behavior of microgravity flame spread.

One of the striking predictions of the theory was that a flame in a quiescent environment is self-extinguishing irrespective of the fuel geometry. The simplified theory also predicts that flames over cylindrical geometry spreads faster than on a comparable flat suface.

This research is being conducted in collaboration with Professor Robert Altenkirch, Washington State University, Dr. Mike Delichastios, Factory Mutual Fire Research Center, and Dr. Kurt Sacksteder, NASA Lewis Research Center.