Reinventing Fire in Space
Could this discovery be the spark that redesigns internal combustion?
Since the first bipedal humanoid “captured” flames set alight by lightning and began to use it for heat, light, protection and then roasting meat on the barbee, mankind has reaped the benefits of combustion in countless ways.
It has been fire by which the industrial revolution was and is driven, as we learned to create fiery explosions in chambers where heat could be converted to power and motion. You will benefit from fire the next time you crank on the family Subaru. Fire powers civilization, with the exception of a small bit of other heat sources like geothermal (also fire driven), hydro-power and nuclear.
So the point of this tiny homily is to point out that we know squat about combustion and fire, really. But we can now study flame physics in space, and there, it is a whole ‘nother thing.
What sparked my reading about this today was coming across the ISS (space station) news about “spherical cool diffusion flames” as a different kind of combustion known theoretically and seen experimentally (with great difficulty) on Earth and in a space flight observation in 2012 but only very briefly.
The current ISS crew made an initial, in-depth study of the phenomenon in July of this year, and even physics-naive as I am, it is easy to grasp the take-away: this re-discovery of fire may have spin-offs both on Earth and in space. Cleaner, cooler fires using modified gas mixtures could bring about a revolution in the evolving history of mankind’s utilization of combustion. That’s kind cool, right?
This piece at syfywire gives the best thumbnail summary. I’ll add a couple of other links, just because they are at hand.
🔥 Cool diffusion flames could mean clean fuel of the future 🔥
See also..
Unusual "cool flames" discovered aboard International Space Station
You lead your readers in so many unexpected directions! Fun!