Abstract: Solid Surface Combustion Experiments (SSCE)
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 ambient oxygen level affects the flame propagation over solid fuels, experiments are conducted in drop-towers, in airplanes executing parabolic trajectories, and in the Space Shuttles. In some of these experiments we ignite fuel samples made of thin cellulose or thick PMMA (plexiglas) at one end, and observe how fast the flame spreads along it under different ambient conditions. These experimental results are compared with the prediction of an elaborate computational model we have developed to simulate the behavior of microgravity flame spread.

One of the striking predictions of our theoretical work was that a flame in a quiescent environment is self-extinguishing irrespective of the level of oxygen. A recent experiment confirmed that conclusion.

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