Wall-Drop And Drop-Drop Interactions And Deformations In Microgravity

The management of fluids in microgravity represents on the most serious challenges to the designers of many important spacecraft elements including liquid fuel tanks, cryogen storage tanks and water recycling systems. One of the most serious limitations to solving these problems has been the lack of reliable analytical tools for the prediction of fluid behavior in the low gravity environment of space systems. Multiphase flow, including liquid-gas, liquid-liquid, liquid-solid, and gas-solid combinations are present in a variety of power systems, life support systems, fluid transfer operations, and many others. In the low gravity environment, surface tension and inertial forces take a more predominant role than they do on earth-based systems and thus produce important qualitative and quantitative changes in flow behavior.

One such problem involving multiphase flows is tankage, defined as the means of containing and transporting liquids such as fuels, cryogens, biological wastes, and water (Weislogel, 1998). Important and recurring problem areas are liquid acquisition, tank pressure and thermal control and mass gauging. Most of these involve the fundamental problem of static and dynamic interface behavior that plays an important role in determining the location and distribution of a liquid in a tank in the absence of gravity.

Our understanding of the dynamic behavior of deformable fluid masses is necessarily preceded by our knowledge of particle behavior in dispersed multiphase flows. The interaction of dispersed particle flows with the walls of the container and our characterization of this behavior provides an introduction to the more complex phenomenon of deformable mass behavior and the interaction between fluid blobs among themselves and with the walls of the container.
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