Drop Tower Experiment to Study the Capillary Flow in Symmetrical and Asymmetrical Channels: Experimental Set-up and Preliminary Results

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• 作者：Xiao Liang Chen ; Yuan Gao ; Qiu Sheng Liu
• 关键词：Capillary channel flow ; Interface stability ; Critical flow rate ; Drop tower
• 刊名：Microgravity Science and Technology
• 出版年：2016
• 出版时间：October 2016
• 年：2016
• 卷：28
• 期：5
• 页码：569-574
• 全文大小：2,673 KB
• 刊物类别：Engineering
• 刊物主题：Extraterrestrial Physics and Space Sciences
  Aerospace Technology and Astronautics
  Classical Continuum Physics
  
• 出版者：Springer Netherlands
• ISSN：1875-0494
• 卷排序：28

文摘

Owing to the development of the space exploration activities, the in-orbit management of fluids such as the transportation of propellant liquid in microgravity becomes the important direction of microgravity fluid research, and one of main problems is the stability behaviors of free surface flow in capillary channel of PMD. In the present study, an experiment set-up of the fluid transport with two different capillary channels has been developed on the Beijing Drop Tower platform. Both symmetrical and asymmetrical flow channels, with the same cross-sectional areas and lengths and different cross-sectional geometries were used and HFE-7500 is chosen as test liquid. 10 times of the drop-down experiments were performed for investigation of the capillary flow characters in different volumetric flow rates, and the three main patterns of capillary flows: subcritical flow, critical flow and supercritical flow were found in experiments, these patterns are distinguished by the movement of the point of lowest surface over time. Meanwhile, the critical flow rates at which free surface becomes instable observed in our experiments are (1) 2.7 ±0.2ml/s for the critical flow rate of asymmetrical channel; and (2) 2.2 ±0.2ml/s for symmetrical channel flow, respectively.