Microgravity Combustion

Microgravity Combustion brings together, for the first time, a large and growing literature on combustion in microgravity, as collated and described by recognized experts in the field of combustion science, who are active in the specialty of combustion science in microgravity. Surprisingly, no one has provided a detailed description of how microgravity conditions are obtained in the various facilities available to researchers (e.g. drop towers, low-gravity aircraft flying Keplerian trajectories, Space Shuttle, International Space Station). This is provided in the book. The book also stresses the importance of forces and transport phenomena often neglected (sometimes without justification) in combustion processes, because these neglected or weak forces become apparent when the masking effects of buoyancy are eliminated. These forces are generally poorly taught or described in the previous literature. Examples include thermal radiative heat transfer from small flames, thermophoresis, thermocapillary flows, and purely diffusive transport. It also answers long-held questions about flammability in spacecraft.
It was once thought that there would be no flammability limits in microgravity, but such limits are in fact observed and now predicted experimentally.