How was the experiment with fire on the ISS?

NASA astronauts’ time is valuable, so the ACME team tried to conduct experiments whenever possible from NASA’s Glenn ISS Payload Control Center in Cleveland.

This knowledge can help engineers around the world develop furnaces, power plants, boilers and other combustion systems that will be more efficient, more environmentally friendly and safer.
– said Dennis Stoker, a researcher on the ACME project at NASA’s Glenn Research Center.

Experiments continued inside the module of the combustion rack built in the station 4.5 years in orbit. While ACME is no longer there — removed in February to make room for a new series of fire safety experiments called “Solid Fuel Ignition and Extinguishing” or SoFIE — Stoker notes that the contribution of the ACME experiment was larger than originally anticipated.

The ACME hardware will return to Earth sometime in 2022 (says NASA) and will be reused for a new set of experiments that will be sent into space over the next few years.

The following experiments were completed during the NASA installation:

• Burn rate emulator (BRE) – Materials shown may burn for several minutes when there is no draft in the atmosphere of the crew being evaluated for future missions.
• Coflow Laminar Diffusion Flame (CLD Flame) – to develop computational models, reference data were obtained in extreme conditions such as soot retention and high dilution.
• Cold flame operation with gases (CFI-G) – resulted in a cold flame of gaseous fuel without premixing and without improvements such as the addition of heated reagents, pulsed plasma or ozone required for ground testing.
• Effect of electric field on laminar diffusion flame (E-FIELD flame) – demonstrated the potential use of electric fields to reduce flame emissions without prior mixing.
• flame design – For the first time, a metastable spherical flame has been demonstrated, without prior mixing and radiation heat loss, leading to the extinction of larger flames.
• Structure and reaction of spherical diffusion flame (s-Flame) – Data on flame growth and extinguishing are provided to improve computational models.

Experiments with fire on the ISS: watch the video