A review of motivations, methods, and achievements on microgravity combustion research

Abstract

Microgravity combustion has always been one of the key and frontier research fields in the international combustion community. Why has microgravity combustion attracted so much attention? First of all, fire safety and combustion reliability are imminent to spacecraft. Secondly, the convection effect is weakened in the microgravity environment, and the basic combustion phenomena are more prominent, which is greatly helpful to study the fundamental laws of combustion and develop reliable combustion models for fuels. This article systematically summarized and analyzed the research focuses, namely fire safety of spacecraft, droplet combustion, soot formation and flame structures, and current research status in the field of microgravity combustion during the past decades of years. In this paper, motivations, methods, and achievements of fire safety in spacecraft and fundamental combustion characteristics in microgravity were analyzed, which provide a comprehensive review for the microgravity combustion research. Suggestions for the development direction of microgravity combustion science were also made. Improving the application of efficient and clean combustion and optimizing fire safety strategies of new generation spacecraft materials should still be regarded as two critical targets in the future.