Bizarre Boiling
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Bizarre Boiling
Watching liquids boil in low gravity is an out-of-this-world
experience. It has plenty of entertainment value, but it's teaching
scientists some important physics lessons, too.
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September 7, 2001: The next time you're watching a pot of water boil, perhaps for coffee or a cup of soup, pause for a moment and consider: what would this look like in space? Would the turbulent bubbles rise or fall? And how big would they be? Would the liquid stay in the pan at all?
Until a few years ago, nobody knew. Indeed, physicists have trouble understanding the complex behavior of boiling fluids here on Earth. Perhaps boiling in space would prove even more baffling.... It's an important question because boiling happens not only in coffee pots, but also in power plants and spacecraft cooling systems. Engineers need to know how boiling works.
Above: Without buoyancy or convection, boiling fluids behave quite differently in space. Click on the image for a low-resolution QuickTime movie (400 kB) comparing boiling in space and on Earth. Also available in high resolution (4.3 MB). Image courtesy NASA Glenn Research Center .
In the early 1990's a team of scientists and engineers from the University of Michigan and NASA decided to find out. Using a freon coolant as their liquid, they conducted a series of boiling experiments on the space shuttle during 5 missions between 1992 to 1996. And indeed, they found some intriguing differences between what happens to boiling fluids on Earth and what happens to them in orbit. For example, a liquid boiling in weightlessness produces -- not thousands of effervescing bubbles -- but one giant undulating bubble that swallows up smaller ones!
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"Think of it: no one had really seen boiling in space before these experiments -- in the whole world, ever!" says Dr. Francis Chiaramonte, who was the NASA Project Scientist for the Pool Boiling Experiment. Already, he says, the series of experiments has come to be regarded as "classic" by today's researchers.
Despite its entertainment value, this research is much more than a simple curiosity. Learning how liquids boil in space will lead to more efficient cooling systems for spacecraft, such as the ammonia-based system on the International Space Station. Knowledge of boiling in space might also be used someday to design power plants for space stations that use sunlight to boil a liquid to create vapor, which would then turn a turbine to produce electricity.
The research could also have applications here on Earth. The weightless environment gives scientists a new "window" into the phenomenon of boiling. Scientists can use this perspective to improve their understanding of the fundamentals of boiling, which might be used to improve the design of terrestrial power plants.
Right:
The
International Space Station uses a "2-phase" cooling
system in which ammonia changes from liquid to vapor and back,
which involves boiling. Engineers designing the ISS cooling system
used information gleaned from microgravity boiling experiments.
"The phenomenon of boiling is so complex that most of
our understanding is empirical, rather than based on the solutions
to fundamental equations," Chiaramonte says.
In the free-fall of orbit, boiling is simpler than it is on Earth.
Weightlessness effectively removes two of the variables in boiling
-- convection and buoyancy. This difference explains why boiling
liquids behave so differently in space. It also provides a powerful
tool for scientists who want to unravel the tangled physics of
boiling.
"As an example, imagine you were trying to study the Earth,
which has such complex ecosystems. You would also want to look
at a simpler planet with fewer variables. One thing space does
for us is simplify the problem that we're studying," Chiaramonte
says.
When a pool of liquid is heated on Earth, gravity causes hotter
regions in the liquid to rise, and cooler, more dense parts to
sink -- a process called "convection." This motion
spreads the heat around inside the liquid. Once it begins to
boil, buoyancy sends bubbles hurling upward, creating a "rolling
boil."
All of this motion within the liquid makes the physics of the
situation much more complex.
Left: Without buoyancy,
the vapor produced by boiling simply floats as a bubble inside
the liquid after the heating has stopped. Surface tension effects
cause the many small bubbles produced to coalesce into one large
sphere. Click the image to see a 1.3
MB MPEG movie of smaller bubbles gathering into the large
one.
Without convection or buoyancy, the process unfolds differently.
Heated fluid doesn't rise, and instead just sits next to the
heater surface and continues to get warmer. Regions of liquid
away from the heater remain relatively cool. Because a smaller
volume of water is being heated, it comes to a boil much more
quickly. As bubbles of vapor form, though, they don't shoot to
the surface -- they coalesce into a giant bubble that wobbles
around within the liquid.
Much of this could be predicted from existing theory, but to
learn the fine details of the process and to look for unexpected
behaviors, a real experiment was necessary.
"There were many fundamental issues that were still not understood well," says Dr. Herman Merte, the Principal Investigator for the experiments. Merte, who some see as a kind of "founding father" of microgravity pool boiling research, devised the experiments featured in the video tape.
Merte and other scientists had performed earlier research on weightless boiling using "drop towers," which could simulate zero-G for a few seconds by simply dropping samples inside a tall tower. These early experiments provided some guidance for designing the shuttle-based experiment, but these brief glimpses don't really compare to the minutes-long observation provided by the shuttle.
Right:
These
ground-breaking microgravity boiling experiments were the "brain
child" of Dr. Herman Merte, who recently retired from the
University of Michigan. See a retirement
tribute to Professor Merte.
One important product of that early research, though, was a method
for building a boiling chamber that let scientists look through
the heater surface and watch the liquid right where it contacts
the heater.
"The action is right at the solid-liquid interface at the
heater, and you can't look down from the top because you have
the refraction of the fluid's upper surface that interferes,"
says Merte, who recently retired as Emeritus Professor of Mechanical
Engineering at the University of Michigan.
Merte used quartz to make a smooth, hard, transparent bottom
for the boiling chamber. Then he coated that quartz with an ultra-thin
layer of gold. Less than 400 angstroms thick (an angstrom is
one ten-billionth of a meter), this layer was so thin that it
allowed visible light to pass through it, yet it still conducted
electricity like bulk gold.
Below: One way to simulate the weightlessness of space is to simply let an experiment freefall inside a "drop tower," such as this one at NASA's Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio. Other methods for simulating weightlessness include flying parabolic arcs in aircraft -- such as NASA's KC-135 "vomit comet" used to train astronauts -- and using sounding rockets. Image courtesy NASA Glenn Research Center.
Using this apparatus, Merte and his colleagues
made some interesting discoveries. For example, depending on
the temperature conditions of the experiment, the giant bubble
would sometimes float in the center of the liquid and sometime
remained attached to the heater surface. When the bubble remained
attached -- which Merte calls a "dry out" -- it effectively
insulated the liquid from the heater, preventing further boiling
and causing the heater temperature to soar.
Knowing precisely the conditions when this occurs is vital for
designing spacecraft systems that might rely on boiling.
"If you understand a phenomenon better, then you can design
for it closer to its limits for optimization," Merte says.
"If you have an uncertainty, then you're going to design
conservatively."
Today's researchers continue to expand on the foundation of knowledge laid by these experiments. With a better understanding of the physics of boiling fluids, engineers will be able to design improved cooling and power systems to serve people in the future -- both in space and here on Earth.
Note: To request a copy of the 67-minute video containing footage from the experiments, please contact the NASA Glenn Research Center at +1-216-433-6159 and specify tape number 396.
Web LinksPool Boiling Experiment homepage -- information about the experiments featured in this article
Pool Boiling Curve in Microgravity -- technical information about the experiments from Merte's University of Michigan website.
Space Research -- more information from NASA's Office of Physical and Biological Research.
Pool Boiling Experiment -- more information about boiling on Earth and in space from Microgravity News
Microgravity Resources for Teachers -- from NASA Spacelink
Microgravity Fluid Physics Program -- at NASA's Glenn Research Center
Staying Cool on the ISS -- Science@NASA article: In a strange new world where hot air doesn't rise and heat doesn't conduct, the International Space Station's thermal control systems maintain a delicate balance between the deep-freeze of space and the Sun's blazing heat.
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