A numerical study based on VOF model has been carried out to investigate the dynamics of water droplet impact on solid surface in microgravity in comparison with that in normal gravity to discuss the differences of the extinguishing mechanism of water mist in different gravity level. Water droplets with different initial diameters and impact velocities were considered. The simulated results show that the deformation process in microgravity lags behind that in normal gravity. And it was also found that Dmaxand spread velocities are smaller in microgravity as the potential energy decreases and the time taken for a liquid droplet to reach its maximum spread has no obvious regularity. Hence, the effect of cooling the fuel surface and diluting fuel vapour with water mist in microgravity may be not as good as that in normal gravity.The critical impact Weber number for water droplet breaking up in microgravity is lower than that in normal gravity as the reduction of the value of Bond number, which may result in diluting fuel vapour with water mist in microgravity being more effective than that in normal gravity in some case.
Water mist technology has been developed and regarded as a promising substitute fire-extinguishing agent in spacecraft. In this paper, a numerical simulation method is introduced to investigate the effect of water mist size, velocity and flow rateon the fire suppressionefficiencyin microgravity. The fire extinguishing efficiency is better for the finer water mist in microgravity due to better heat transfer and more rapid vaporization. The evaporation cooling is the dominant mechanism of fire suppression in microgravity.As for the water mist velocity, the performance of fire suppression is affected slightly in microgravity. The results on the effect of water flow rate show that the flow rate should be higher than a critical value to suppress the fire effectively.
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