Abstract: Diffusion and Radiative Transport Controlled Fires (DARTFire)
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 fires propagates over solid fuels in the absence of gravity, experiments are conducted in free falling elevators (drop-towers), in airplanes executing parabolic trajectories and in payloads carried by Sounding Rockets. In some of these experiments we ignite a flat sample of PMMA at one end and observe how fast the flame spreads across it under different ambient conditions. The radiation signature at different wavelengths (ultra-violet, visible and infra-red) are captured by two different video cameras. 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.

The data obtained from these experiments are still being analyzed. Some of these data are posted on the DARTFire home page. One of the important findings of this project is the discovery of a new class of flames, called radiative flames, in a microgravity environment. Despite their small size, these flames have been found to transfer significant portion of their energy through thermal radiation, a phenomenon usually associated with large-scale fires.

This research is being conducted in collaboration with Professor Robert Altenkirch, Washington State University and Dr. Sandra Olson, NASA Lewis Research Center.