Fire Safety in the Low-Gravity Spacecraft Environment

Microgravity Research in Spacecraft Fire Safety

Fire prevention, detection, and suppression requirements for spacecraft have been developed primarily from established terrestrial and aircraft systems aided by the experience gained from previous space operations. However, the most important factor distinguishing spacecraft fire protection from terrestrial systems is the low-gravity environment that dominates fire and particulate behavior and ...

Spacecraft Fire Detection: Smoke Properties and Transport in Low-Gravity

Results from a recent smoke particle size measurement experiment conducted on the International Space Station (ISS) are presented along with the results from a model of the transport of smoke in the ISS. The experimental results show that, for the materials tested, a substantial portion of the smoke particles are below 500 nm in diameter. The smoke transport model demonstrated that mixing domin...

“smoke:” Characterization of Smoke Particulate for Spacecraft Fire Detection

INTRODUCTION The “Smoke” experiment is a flight definition investigation that seeks to increase our understanding of spacecraft fire detection through measurements of particulate size distributions of preignition smokes from typical spacecraft materials. Owing to the catastrophic risk posed by even a very small fire in a spacecraft, the design goal for spacecraft fire detection is to detect the...

Safety Analysis of Spent Fuel Transportation Cask of Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant through the Passing of Fire Tunnel with ANSYS®10.0

The spent fuel assemblies (FAs) of Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant are planed to be transported by TK-13 casks. Each spent fuel transportation cask holds 12 spent FAs and has a thick steel container to provide shielding. The calculations have been performed for FAs with burn ups of 60 MWd/kg and a 3-years cooling period. The ANSYS®10.0 general finite element analysis package was se...

Risk-based Fire Safety Experiment Definition for Manned Spacecraft