Microgravity droplet combustion: effect of tethering fiber on burning rate and flame structure

Droplets tethering on fibers has become a well established technique for conducting droplet combustion experiments in microgravity conditions. The effects of these supporting fibers are frequently assumed to be negligible and are not considered in the experimental analysis or in numerical simulations. In this work, the effect of supporting fibers on the characteristics of microgravity droplet combustion has been investigated numerically; a priori predictions have then been compared with published experimental data. The simulations were conducted using a transient one-dimensional spherosymmetric droplet combustion model, where the effect of the supporting fiber was implicitly taken into account. The model applied staggered convective flux finite volume method combined with high-order implicit time integration. Thermal radiation was evaluated using a statistical narrow band radiation model. Chemical kinetics and thermophysical properties were represented in rigorous detail. Tether fiber diameter, droplet diameter, ambient pressure and oxygen concentration were varied over a range for n-decane droplets in the simulations. The results of the simulations were compared to previously published experiments conducted in the Japan Microgravity Center (JAMIC) 10 second drop tower and the NASA Glenn Research Center (GRC) 5.2 second drop tower. The model reproduces closely nearly all aspects of tethered n-decane droplet burning phenomena, which included droplet burning history, transient and average burning rate, and flame standoff ratio. The predictions show that the presence of the tethering fiber significantly influences the observed burning rate, standoff ratio, and extinction.