COLD BALLS OF FLAME light up International Space Station At first glance, lighting a fire on the International Space Station (ISS) seems like a good way to earn a Darwin Award and the opprobrium of all humanity. Yet boffins have been doing it for some time in an effort to learn more about how flames behave. Interestingly, is the answer from NASA, which today offered a look at some …
The way the flame is dependent on diffusion of oxygen through the depletion zone, each and every point of the sphere can be seen as "one-dimensional" with regards to the reaction system itself.
Mind.. I really don't get how a reaction that not only extracts half of the potential energy of a reaction, but produces poisons to boot can lead to "more efficient combustion engines" through this mechanism. The whole point of a clean burn is to optimise the fuel/oxygen ratio and mixing to produce maximum efficiency (and energy extraction), producing as little as possible in undesireable by-products. Which is what engineers have been cranking their brains on for the past decades.
I really don't get how a reaction that not only extracts half of the potential energy of a reaction, but produces poisons to boot can lead to "more efficient combustion engines" through this mechanism
Because it shows us what not to do? Process of elimination? Better understanding of why x doesn't work can give us insight on how to make x1 work better.
"I really don't get how a reaction that not only extracts half of the potential energy of a reaction, but produces poisons to boot can lead to "more efficient combustion engines" through this mechanism."
The biggest waste product of modern internal combustion engines is heat. If we could figure out how to use "cold flame" in them, more energy would be used to move the vehicle, rather than uselessly heating up things.
The end goal *is* to efficiently and completely convert fuel to energy, but at the lower "cold flame" temperatures, producing less waste heat.
From the NASA site: http://mynasa1.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experiments/FLEX-2.html
The advantage of the spherical symmetry is that only one spatial dimension enters the description of the combustion process. This greatly simplifies the mathematics required for modeling combustion processes. ...
In the absence of gravity, small droplets of fuel (i.e., from 2 mm to 4 mm in diameter) burn "one-dimensionally", which means the flame will be shaped a like ball about the size of a large olive that will be centered around the droplet. This one-dimensional nature of the droplet flame allows the science team to easily measure and understand important features of the burning fuel that would otherwise be impossible to obtain on the ground. This particular type of flame configuration allows measurement and observation of very complex interactions in a spherically one-dimensional system, providing insights into the behavior of combustion phenomena that would otherwise be difficult, if not impossible, to obtain in multi-dimensional systems that are typically found in most 1-g fires.
explaining everything from first principles every time.
We have the internet please so dont waste my bandwidth and life showing me what fire is like on earth for two fucking minutes before even mentioning the space station. We're going to need multiple fibre to the home if people start doing HD video of their life just before they tell us what happened yesterday.
Amused to hear on the Vid the phrase "not hither and yon throughout the flame" (around 2:15 into clip).
Fabulous! I didn't realise that NASA employed 17th Century language in its experiments. Clearly, this explains how the "Space Race" has been running in reverse for the last few decades...they need their Boffins to catch up (and get over the fact that steam-punk is not a revolutionary new inter-solar power source perhaps? ;)
Hehe, this is really quite interesting.
I wonder if some ball lightning is just a side effect of updraughts in the storm producing a near zero gravity region?
Don't forget that the equivalence principle means that acceleration is functionally identical to gravity so an air updraught would work equally well.
All it would need is a lightning bolt or just a streamer to ignite the gases and voila!
Also worth mentioning, a lot of BL sightings occur in rural areas where a lot of methane and possibly other volatiles such as carbon dust from soil tilling often end up airborne.
A relevant sighting occurred in the UK where a "ball of flame" appeared over a lady's cooker.
In this case it could have been the updraught forming over the cooker hood which stabilised the BL so it
persisted for a few seconds while the fuel was used up.
AC/DC 6EQUJ5
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