Relationship Between Blow-Off Behavior and Limiting Oxygen Concentration in Microgravity Environments of Flame Retardant Materials

Effects of flame retardants on extinction limits, spread rate, and smoke release in opposed-flow flame spread over thin cylindrical polyethylene samples in microgravity

“…In addition, their prohibitive cost and limited range of applications hampers a sustainable production. Investigating the difference caused by buoyancy, Takahashi et al compared flammability of other more common flame resistant materials, such as NOMEX, Kevlar, Kapton, CARBOGLASS, PEEK, PPSU, silicone resin, and silicone rubber, under both normal and micro-gravity [15,16]. They found that, among these materials, those with higher pyrolysis temperatures inhibit flame spread in microgravity and can self-extinguish under higher oxygen content than observed at normal gravity.…”

Flame Spread over Polyethylene Film: Effects of Gravity and Fuel Inclination

“…Various ground-based fire tests, spacecraft experiments, and numerical simulations have been made to study the fire behaviors of solid fuels in microgravity (Fujita 2015;Rojas-Alva and Jomaas 2022). For example, the microgravity flame spread dynamics and typical fuels, such as cellulose papers (Olson 1991;Olson et al 1989;Ramachandra et al 1995;Vetturini et al 2020;Wang et al 2015), PMMA (Hu et al 2014;Link et al 2018;Olson et al 2004;Urban et al 2019;Wang and Zhu 2019;Wu et al 2020a, b;Zhu et al 2019), thin wires (Fujita et al 2002;Nagachi et al 2019;Takahashi et al 2013), PDMS membranes (Rojas-Alva et al 2022) and fabrics (Takahashi et al 2020(Takahashi et al , 2019Zhao et al 2017), have been investigated and compared with normal-gravity dynamics. In particular, thermoplastic materials, such as polyethylene (PE) and polyurethane (PU), are widely used for electrical wires and insulation materials in human-crewed spacecraft.…”

Introduction to Special Issue on Spacecraft Fire Safety

“…Unique space fire experiments have been conducted in the International Space Station [5,6], unmanned spacecraft [7], and a satellite [8] to understand the long-term micro-gravity combustion and fire phenomena. The fire dynamics small and thin fuels are also explored through ground-based microgravity experiments using drop towers [9] and parabolic flights [10][11][12][13][14]. In addition, combustion and fire experiments under reduced pressures [15][16][17] and a narrow channel [18] are applied to lower the influence of buoyancy and simulate low-gravity environments on Earth.…”

“…Proper material selection for spaceflight requires a thorough knowledge of fire and flammability behavior in varied gravity. Thus, the critical conditions for flame ignition and extinction in microgravity are extensively explored under different ignition protocols [12], oxygen concentrations [11][12][13], airflow rates [13] and radiant heat fluxes [11], and for flame retardant materials [13].…”