Low Gravity Gas-Liquid Contactor: Effects of Reduced and Zero Gravity on Rayleigh-Plateau Instability
Raul Garcia-Sanchez, Janelle Holmes, Ajamu Abdullah, Aara'L Yarber, Ryan O'Donnell, Prabhakar Misra,Bradley Carpenter
Citation :Raul Garcia-Sanchez,et.al, Low Gravity Gas-Liquid Contactor: Effects of Reduced and Zero Gravity on Rayleigh-Plateau Instability International Journal of Advanced Research in Physical Science 2017,4(2) : 28-36
Liquids are incompressible fluids that move in response to applied forces. The dominant forces determining the shape of a free interface of a liquid at rest are gravity and surface tension. On Earth, at length scales larger than a few millimeters, gravity typically dominates. The purpose of this experiment was to observe the behavior of water, a Newtonian fluid, and the effects of surface tension, without the dominating force of gravity. During this experiment, multiple syringes of two different sizes were used to eject water during a microgravity flight experiment, forming a liquid column between two contact points. The behavior of this column was recorded and analyzed to determine the maximum length reached before the column breaks off. The longest water column size observed was 5.29 cm using a 3 ml syringe and 6.48 cm using a 10 ml syringe, respectively, under the reduced gravity experimental conditions aboard the modified Boeing 727 jet aircraft.