Fire Burns Differently In Space 146
New submitter black6host writes with this interesting snippet from Space.com: "NASA is playing with fire on the International Space Station — literally. Since March 2009, the space agency's Flame Extinguishment Experiment, or FLEX, has conducted more than 200 tests to better understand how fire behaves in microgravity, which is still not well understood. The research could lead to improved fire suppression systems aboard future spaceships, and it could also have practical benefits here on Earth, scientists said."
There is no FIRE IN SPACE YOU DUMBA (Score:5, Funny)
Oh my god what are you idiots d
Re:There is no FIRE IN SPACE YOU DUMBA (Score:4, Informative)
Well, as long as there is oxygen around, things should combust.
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Re:There is no FIRE IN SPACE YOU DUMBA (Score:5, Insightful)
Okay, there's no GRAVITATIONAL convection, which is the dominant method that enables fresh oxygen to get to a fire in the earth's atmosphere.
Don't tell that to fires. Fires often create their own convection due to a variety of factors.
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On Earth, the dominant form is thermal/gravitational convection. That won't be very active at all on ISS. As stated in TFA, diffusion becomes the dominant mechanism.
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Or more easy, excessive cooling by convection is one of the main problems to start a new fire.
Re:There is no FIRE IN SPACE YOU DUMBA (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, as long as there is oxygen around, things should combust.
Sure, in a crude way you're right and there are a lot of electricals and combustibles on spacecraft. But HOW does it burn when there is no UP? We're so use to hot air rising that our everyday ideas of how to deal with a fire, like get down low, will not work in space. These are ideas that save lives here but are of no use if a fire were to break out. We can only develop new ideas if we get some direct experimental experience. Also it may lead to an ability to harness the differences inherent in a zero g process for industrial/manufacturing processes (but I'm just speculating here). This is worthwhile basic science.
Re:There is no FIRE IN SPACE YOU DUMBA (Score:5, Interesting)
I would think that the worst possible thing (or best possible thing, from Invader Zim's viewpoint) that could happen with a fire in zero G is air flow / turbulence. If there isn't any movement of air, then the oxygen surrounding the fire is consumed and the fire burns very slowly. Since convection currents are a product of gravity, they don't occur in zero G so no fresh O2 is sucked into the fire for combustion as it does here on earth. So I would think anywhere there is an air vent blowing air, or even people just moving around in the environment, you'd have blowtorch like fire forming where the air is disturbed. I bet you could literally see the turbulence in the air as wisps of flame. Kind of disturbing to think of.
An example of this is in a swimming pool. Have you noticed that if you hold very still in motionless, cold water, that you will begin to feel warmer, but as soon as you move it feels cold again (and no, I'm not talking about heating the pool with your pee). That is because the molecules closest to your body heat up, and since they aren't flowing and being replaced by colder molecules, only conduction takes heat away. It's sort of the same principle with fire in zero-g, where the fuel has consumed the oxygen near it (and it is also surrounded by combustion byproducts as well), so as long as fresh air isn't wafted into it, combustion almost grinds to a halt.
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But would the temperature difference in itself create some fluid movement ?
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Heat causes the air to expand, but it expands in all directions.
So you get a bubble of low density CO2 around the fire, but not any movement, because there is no gravity to organize low density air above high density air.
Re:There is no FIRE IN SPACE YOU DUMBA (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:There is no FIRE IN SPACE YOU DUMBA (Score:5, Informative)
There is and it was the same with the space shuttles etc... if you lost something there was a good chance you could find it sucked up against in exhaust vent.
Re:There is no FIRE IN SPACE YOU DUMBA (Score:4, Interesting)
If I remember right: ISS, MIR... are/were very noisy because everything electronic has to be cooled by forced convection (fans). Without natural convection even a low powered circuit board that would easily dissipate the heat on Earth could eventually overheat in zero G as the heated air just sits there next to the components.
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So you get a bubble of low density CO2 around the fire, but not any movement
That's correct, except for the parts where it's backwards and/or wrong. The heat given off as the product of combustion should increase the pressure of CO (and/or other products of combustion) (see: Charles' Law) which we are guessing would radiate away in all directions. That pressure increase should cause airflow from the area of higher pressure to the area of lower pressure (see: Wind). So (totally guessing/hypothesizing here) it seems to me that the heat generated as a result of combustion would increa
Re:There is no FIRE IN SPACE YOU DUMBA (Score:5, Insightful)
What you, grandparent, and great-grandparent have overlooked is just how inveterate motion is. Matter is always in motion above zero degrees Kelvin. The environment of the space station is going to be around room temperature, well above 0K, meaning lots of atomic motion. The molecules of this CO2 "bubble" will quickly disperse as they follow down their concentration gradient. Conversely, molecules of O2 will quickly reach the flame as they follow down their concentration gradient. The astronauts could stop oxygen from getting to the flame by sealing it, but not by staying very still.
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Assuming you had a perfectly spherical object burning evenly. Some easy to consider examples down on Earth are the hazards of igniting powders like coal dust and flour, hazards in coal mines and traditional windmills. These would cause explosions simply because of the small particle size and rapid oxidisation. No need to consider gravity, as Brownian motion of air molecules compensate for the force of gravity.
A large burning object like a candle or one of those jumbo matchsticks would probably spin around i
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So from what you're leading to if you see a fire in microgravity and try to run away from it your motion would pull in oxygen and make the flames fly towards you!?
The more you move the worse the fire gets as you create more convection. Yikes!
There goes stop drop and roll, would be more like Stop and remain motionless.
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Stopping and remaining motionless puts out my wife's fire also.
Re:There is no FIRE IN SPACE YOU DUMBA (Score:5, Funny)
There goes stop drop and roll, would be more like Stop and remain motionless.
Pretend the fire is a T-Rex.
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There goes stop drop and roll, would be more like Stop and remain motionless.
Pretend the fire is a T-Rex.
What ever happened to sending a urine bubble straight at it!? No imagination you guys!
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Re:There is no FIRE IN SPACE YOU DUMBA (Score:4, Interesting)
You require 3 things to keep a conventional fire going. Heat, fuel, and oxygen. The fire would not spread outwards unless there was fuel to burn as well. The same was that a campfire doesn't just keep spreading outwards away from the fire pit, since all the wood (fuel) is in the pit. Now if you were to spill a container of oil or other combustible liquid inside the space station, and then set it on fire. Now the fire could theoretically spread outwards in all directions as the liquid also spread outwards.
On Earth, most fire suppression systems work on removing the heat and to some extent oxygen from the fire triangle. We use compressed CO2, which cools the area as it expands while also displacing some of the oxygen. Or by dousing it with a lot of water, which again cools the surrounding area and displaces some of the oxygen with steam.
In a space station, I think the easiest way to stop a fire would be to vent the atmosphere since removing the oxygen would kill the fire right away. Though the downside is that humans also require oxygen so it'd kill any crew members in that section as well (Assuming they weren't in protective suits).
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The reason a flame rises on Earth is because of the very slight pressure difference between the bottom of the flame and the top. There is negligible lateral pressure differences, so the flame is roughly cylindrically symmetric. As the OP says, this is indirectly due to gravitational acceleration (though the gravitational field is essentially the same in LEO).
This is why you see an almost spherical flame in space. The pressure is approximately equal all around it and the flame expands outwards.
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Reading the heading of the article, I'm surprised they only got around to it now, we use combustion quite a bit as humans and it would be quite useful in space, I also wonder how artificial gravity would affect it considering something like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nautilus-X [wikipedia.org] .
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I'm just going wtf is this news of 2011?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flame#Flames_in_microgravity [wikipedia.org]
I'm pretty sure I saw a similar picture in some book, magazine or something before 2000 too though. it's such an obvious experiment...
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Slightly off topic, but I read a book, a long time ago, about a space station in low earth orbit. In the book, there were a few paragraphs that discussed what might happen to a fire in micro-gravity. When a teacher lit a match, it burned with a spherical flame, and put it self out quickly, because there was no place for the CO2 to go. If you wanted the match to continue burning, you had to keep it moving.
The book was science fiction, but it would be interesting to find out if they were correct.
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Re:There is no FIRE IN SPACE YOU DUMBA (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:There is no FIRE IN SPACE YOU DUMBA (Score:5, Funny)
Re:There is no FIRE IN SPACE YOU DUMBA (Score:5, Informative)
That's a nice notion. However, there's a wicked problem with the bends. People say "your blood will boil", but that's not actually what happens; the bubbles will be dissolved gasses coming out of solution. even if you go with a straight oxygen environment (which we learned was a "bad idea" in the Apollo program), the oxygen dissolved in the astronaut's blood will come out of solution. Unfortunately, it won't dissolve again very quickly, which will leave you with bubbles in bad places, like the brain and lungs.
You're also making the assumption that you have enough stored gas (call it air) to repressurize the spacecraft. Even if you live through the depressurization and repressurization, you haven't addressed the source of the fire, which will likely re-ignite. As long as spacecraft are small, gold-plated things, designing to current fire specs is a given. However, as they evolve into large vehicles, designing fire-proofing into everythign will become less and less feasible. People will want to bring clothes and food and shit like that.
The other major thing to be considered is that while droplets behave differently, we also haven't looked at explosive combustion. I suspect it will be very similar. However, we might find that it's very different. Right now we cover military pilots in polyaramids, and accept that paying passengers are probably going to die in a flash fire. The assumption behind the flight suit is that the pilot's on an O2 mask, and so the lungs will be protected. Flash fires might behave very differently, and fire is a complex, complex beast.
I've lived through a fire in an airplane, and it's scarry as fuck. Fortuantely, the aerospace community is very aware of it and designs against it.
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People say "your blood will boil", but that's not actually what happens; the bubbles will be dissolved gasses coming out of solution.
Um, that's the definition of boiling: Dissolved gasses coming out of solution. Can be induced by heating the fluid, lowering the atmospheric pressure, or both.
Re:There is no FIRE IN SPACE YOU DUMBA (Score:5, Informative)
Re:There is no FIRE IN SPACE YOU DUMBA (Score:5, Informative)
People say "your blood will boil", but that's not actually what happens; the bubbles will be dissolved gasses coming out of solution.
Um, that's the definition of boiling: Dissolved gasses coming out of solution. Can be induced by heating the fluid, lowering the atmospheric pressure, or both.
I'm not sure either of you are right. Boiling is when something changes state from liquid to gas. If you lower pressure enough, your blood (the water in it anyway) would literally boil at room temperature. However, decompression sickness - gases coming out of solution - is a different phenomenon that would probably happen first (at a higher pressure).
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People say "your blood will boil", but that's not actually what happens; the bubbles will be dissolved gasses coming out of solution.
Um, that's the definition of boiling: Dissolved gasses coming out of solution. Can be induced by heating the fluid, lowering the atmospheric pressure, or both.
Boiling is actually the transition of the liquid into a gas, not gasses dissolved in the liquid coming out of solution. They look incredibly similar, but boiling can happen with a pure liquid, while dissolved gasses kind of by definition cannot come out of solution in a pure liquid. (Yes, the liquid turns to a gas and then kind of dissolves itself in the liquid, but it turns out that a gaseous form of a substance dissolved in the liquid form of that same substance is indistinguishable from the liquid itself
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No, boiling is the substance itself becoming gaseous.
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I don't think that's true.
I've always took boiling to mean the liquid itself was converting to gas, this can happen in low pressure at room temperature, but is not the cause of the bends from diving. A vented space-station could cause it I imagine, though perhaps the skin would keep blood pressure high enough to keep the boiling point of water above room temperature.
I'd be worried about eyeballs falling out.
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Just out of curiosity, I wonder if a quick flush would in fact cause the bends if re-compression was prompt. People can operate at pretty low PSI (space suits are 4.3, atmospheric at sea level is 14.7). Would momentary decompression be a large risk if it was brief enough (my personal knowledge of DCS is only in regards to SCUBA which is obviously on the much higher pressure side of things). My understanding was that DCS normally takes a small period of time to develop that might give a window, though I w
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Yea, I think donning a breathing apparatus and flushing the atmosphere with something inert would be better. It would also give you more of a chance of recovering what was still viable in that atmosphere.
You'd have to make sure it was a closed breather though, else the exhaust would just serve to provide oxidizer.
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Actually, now that I think about it more, since there is no convection, you might be able to just use a halon extinguisher. Using a dense gas to push out the oxygen in the immediate area should be sufficient without requiring a full flush of the atmosphere. The clean up might be a little tricky after and breathing apparatus would still be a very good idea, but it could save energy which is at a premium in space.
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The trick may be to spray with something not so inert as halon... say, nitrogen. You may end up with some nitrous oxide as a byproduct, but it should be something that can isolate the burn and be easily scrubbed/diluted into the atmosphere after the fact. Add a bit of vanilla to the gas as a warning that you're entering a nitrogen-high zone before the fans have mixed it back into the system.
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But as your diastolic blood pressure is more than 0.066 atmosphere, boiling water in the blood is not a problem. Boiling water in the lungs is another story, but here again when lacking oxygen the best way to survive is to cool down very fast and that's what will happen. You just need an expert team for reanimation.
Re:There is no FIRE IN SPACE YOU DUMBA (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not as totally and completely insane as it sounds. Generally, people will recover from exposure to vacuum on their own if the exposure is short (less than 30s) and with surprisingly minor injuries if exposure is less than 90s. And that's without training and a warning of what's going to happen, given proper planning and equipment I suspect you could push the survival rate to the high 90%s, maybe even to two 9's.
Given the choice between burning to death in inescapable zero-g fire and an automated 15 second emergency purge, with a quick re-pressurization system, O2 masks for quicker recovery, and the ability to manage air pressure afterwards to treat the bends... personally, I'd give it a shot. The only real question mark is if the source of the fire has been taken care of. If it's an ongoing short you might find yourself in the same boat you started in, but even that could be addressed by re-pressurizing the spacecraft with nitrogen and relying on O2 masks for the crew until everything is straightened out.
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Yeah, I know you were only being flippant, but...
There's a reason scuba divers are told to *never* hold their breath. If you don't release pressure from your lungs as the ambient pressure decreases (when diving, by ascending), you'll do catastrophic damage to your lungs.
Re:There is no FIRE IN SPACE YOU DUMBA (Score:5, Interesting)
If you don't release pressure from your lungs as the ambient pressure decreases (when diving, by ascending), you'll do catastrophic damage to your lungs.
Not holding your breath in a vacuum presents another problem though. Gas exchange in your lungs is a passive process, driven by concentration gradients. As the partial pressure of O2 in your alveoli drops to zero, the diffusion goes into reverse; blood passing through your lungs actually has its remaining oxygen content sucked out, causing you to black out almost instantly.
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Conclusion: being in a vacuum will kill you.
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Well, actually, they really can, but they better don't hold their breath [nasa.gov]!
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In case of fire: (Score:1)
DO open the window.
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Hold your breath first, though.
Seriously, fire on board something like that would be about the scariest thing to deal with. With loss of air or something, you don't have time to panic but if the fires are burning at 100th their normal rate but are large enough to be pretty much unextinguishable, you've got a lot of fighting to do before you eventually end up burning.
It'll get into every possible escape route and keep following you, it'll slowly suck up all fuel everywhere (can't just "move stuff away" if t
Re:In case of fire: (Score:5, Informative)
relevant: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSqOqRACxUM [youtube.com] (fire at the MIR station)
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..also known as the Russians got there first... as with most things in space
they have done a lot of research on space stations already, they did send up 7 of them, have one manned for 10 years ... and built quite a significant proportion of the ISS ...
The rest of the world have so far built 2 space stations, one is the ISS, jointly with Russia ...
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Hold your breath first, though.
Do NOT hold your breath in the case of sudden decompression. Rapid decompression is entirely survivable if you're recompressed within a minute or two, but holding your breath results in some very nasty damage to your lungs (essentially, your alveoli burst) that would not otherwise occur if you exhaled.
To quote Miller from Event Horizon (Score:1)
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I absolutely love that movie. Sam Neil is one creepy dude (also see: In the Mouth of Madness).
Hal Clements did a neat story on that (Score:2)
``Fireproof'' I think it was, in his collection _Space Lash (formerly published as _Small Changes_)_.
Looks like his theorization on the science was good (as it usually is).
That book, and The Mad Scientists Club books made a huge impact in my childhood.
Why? (Score:2, Insightful)
Why does everything have to be some stupid ass acronym?
Re:Why? (Score:5, Funny)
Are you referring to the WDEHTBSSAA effect?
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Obligatory (Score:5, Funny)
Slow burns are a safety concern... (Score:2)
There is an increased risk of singed cheek hair on the members of the 200 Mile High Blue Flamer's Club.
What's the big deal? (Score:5, Funny)
We all know what to do if a fire breaks out in a spaceship or station. Didn't you people watch Red Planet?
You grab your fire extinguisher, point it at the fire, release the locking pin, pull the handle and get propelled across the room due to no gravity holding you in place and the fire retardant being ejected from the nozzle
Come on you geeks, get with the program!
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Or WALL-E?
Wise choice of acronym (Score:1)
Because FLEE would have been too unfortunate for a Space Station.
Ob "benefits here on earth" debunking (Score:5, Funny)
Decommissioned Shuttles.... (Score:2)
Our tax dollars hard at work... (Score:1)
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Our tax dollars hard at work, fostering galactic pyromaniacs. Where can I opt out my hard earned cash?
Try here:
http://www.farecompare.com/flights/New_York-NYC/Abu_Dhabi-AUH/market.html [farecompare.com]
Just make sure you click the "one way" radio-button.
Good luck!
This definitely provides relevant research (Score:1)
This kind of experimentation provides research to something relevant to all of us, namely the Sun. It's something that very few people put any intense thought into, but is very important to us. There's also quite a bit about it that is not understood and every little bit helps, due to our dependence on its existence and how various unusual and not-well-understood (or not understood at all) phenomena can affect us.
Two quotes from the article stand out to me:
First:
"In space, molecular diffusion draws oxygen
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When one considers that less than 2% of the Sun is something other than Hydrogen and Helium, and Oxygen being only another chunk of that 2% with other elements having their chunks of that respective small percentage, that quote gives us considerable insight into why the Sun and other stars burn for as long as we believe they do.
Two problems with what you said. First, the sun has gravity. It has a lot of gravity, and so hot gases do rise due to convection, as they do on earth. That said, the sun doesn't burn. The heat is generated from nuclear fusion in its core, and that is the reason why stars last so long.
yeah, but... (Score:2)
Re:Don't Yank our Funding (Score:5, Insightful)
but I'd be curious if anyone has any idea what the practical benefits of this experiment could be.
Without basic science, you don't get applied science.
I sure wish the know-nothing "hurr why study fruit flies? hurr!" idiots would fucking understand this.
But no. They get in their cars and drive, use computers, talk on cellphones, dance at the club to kilowatts of audio, eat, drink, and be merry and then decry the amount of money we spend on basic science to make all that possible.
Don't like money spent on basic science? Go live in a yurt.
--
BMO
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Don't like money spent on basic science? Go live in a yurt.
We all know what a yurt is, but the types that you are referring this question to will laugh at you thinking you can't live inside a yogurt...
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Thank your for the word of the day, "yurt". I will incorporate it into future posts, such as "May the tension bands of your yurt give way whilst you are standing beside them, such that you are struck in the face with great and unexpected force" and "May your yurt burn down and consume you as you sleep" and "Yo momma lives in a yurt".
Re:Don't Yank our Funding (Score:4, Insightful)
One day sir, you may tax it. - Faraday's reply to William Gladstone, then British Chancellor of the Exchequer (minister of finance), when asked of the practical value of electricity (1850)
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One day sir, you may tax it.
Well! There goes the internet.
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you are making me so angry for opposing my ignorant ideology that i am forced to rant in reply to you using this microprocesser based computer which will transmit the information over fiber optics which will appear on your lcd screen. god gave us those things, you evil sorcerer
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What on Earth are you talking about? The Khans built a very impressive civilization with those taxes. They may not have been what we today call "civil", but neither were the Romans who couldn't manage the empire we modeled our nation after without their gladiators and slaves.
Besides the civil/civilization mix-up, you're also confused about the difference between taxation in general and the income tax as one of the many methods of collecting taxes. We've always had taxes. Remember that little Tea Party t
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Re:Don't Yank our Funding (Score:5, Interesting)
You do know that we went from the founding of this country to 1913 without an income tax, right?
There was no income tax, but there was taxation. My grandfather was 17 years old in 1913. Few know (as far as I can tell) that when the federal income tax was enacted, only the rich were taxed.
The tax was to pay for a war, which is pretty much where most of your federal income taxes go anyway.
Without income taxes you would not have the interstate highway system (which, incidentally, was built by a Republican administration). I was a little kid when they started building it, and I remember that getting from St Louis to Springfield was a three or four hour drive, vs the hour and a half (or less) on the interstate.
Without federal income taxes you would not have the hoover dam. Americans would not have landed on the moon. America wouldn't have been able to reap the financial winfall of rebuilding Europe after WWII.
The only downside to taxes is that you're a greedy selfish money grubber. Since you seem to be a tea party type, you probably consider yourself to be a Christian (hint: there are no Christians in the Tea Party, it is definitely against everything Jesus taught), you might want to open that bible you like to thump and read Matthew 22:21.
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Read the final sentence of the post to which you are replying. You clearly didn't read it before posting, and you may find it educational.
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Don't think for a second that spending then was anywhere near what it was now, even adjusted for inflation.
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While everything you just said may indeed be true, it says nothing about whether or not there was an income tax in the USA between 1776 and 1913.
You made a boo-boo and got called out on it. Take it like a man.
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I don't know if this is still part of it, but somewhere years back I read that NASA was planning on experimenting with different types of water spraying nozzels on the ISS, IIRC there was a micro-nozzle that sprayed a mist using substantially less water than a regular nozzle and the mist put out fires more effectively than gallons of water in a narrow stream.
Those interested can Google Fine Water Mist and Fire, they did some microgravity testing on a KC-135.
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There was this inventor guy who proposed a new fire extinguisher for cars - it basically vaporized water into a fine mist that smothered flames by reducing the oxygen levels, rather than trying to cover every burning surface with a layer of water. Maybe that's where he ended up working.
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They needed a study to figure this out? Likely, our tax dollars will be spent to figure out the rotational force produced by a sneeze. Didn't anyone think of this in the past 30 years of space travel? o.0
yeah they forgot what they did 10 years ago there..
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Which, if you read the fucking summary, is exactly what is being asked.
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one has to ask .. after all this time:"how many billions dollars does it need to extinguish a fire in zero gravity?"
sheesh, after discovering fire thousands of years ago after climbing down from trees, one would expect this would be
like .. duh .. the first experiment one would do in outerspace?
I think fire was discovered long before we climbed down from the trees. In fact, it may have been an impetus for climbing down from the tree.