Time-evolving Growth Rates in Microgravity-grown Pivalic Acid Dendrites

Rensselaer Isothermal Dendritic Growth Experiment

The Rensselaer Isothermal Dendritic Growth Experiment (RIDGE) is a continuation of the Isolated Dendritic Growth Experiment (IDGE), which flew on three space flight experiments aboard the space shuttle Columbia. The RIDGE is an extension to the completed flight experiments by IDGE, to further investigate phenomenon uncovered in the analysis of data obtained by these earlier efforts. The first t...

Nonconstant Tip Velocity in Microgravity Dendritic Growth

Pivalic acid dendrites grown and observed as part of the USMP-4 isothermal dendritic growth experiment aboard the space shuttle Columbia show an initial transient followed by an accelerating tip growth that may approach a constant growth rate. The mechanism responsible for this behavior is not as yet clear and may be due to experimental factors such as the long-range thermal interactions betwee...

AIAA 2002-0456 Sidebranch Characteristics of Pivalic Acid Dendrites Grown Under Terrestrial- Gravity and Microgravity Conditions

Comparison of Dendritic Growth

The Isothermal Dendritic Growth Experiment (IDGE) is a series of orbital space flight experiments designed to obtain data for a critical test of dendritic growth theory. The first two experiments, flown in 1994 and 1996, were conducted as part of the United States Microgravity Payload Shuttle missions, USMP-2 and USMP-3. These flights provided dendritic growth speeds and tip radii of pure succi...

Crossover Scaling in Dendritic Evolution at Low Undercooling

We examine scaling in two-dimensional simulations of dendritic growth at low undercooling, as well as in three-dimensional pivalic acid dendrites grown on NASA’s USMP-4 isothermal dendritic growth experiment. We report new results on self-affine evolution in both the experiments and simulations. We find that the time-dependent scaling of our low undercooling simulations displays a crossover sca...