To ensure the safety of astronauts aboard the Space Shuttle and, more recently, the International Space Station, the propagation of fire in microgravity environments must be well understood, as it would be significantly different from fires on Earth. Thus, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio studies micro-gravity flame spread through its Analysis of Thermo-diffusive and Hydrodynamic Instabilities in Near-extinction Atmospheres (ATHINA) initiative. The facility has a drop tower, which can be used to demonstrate flame propagation in free-fall, but the drop tests are expensive and limited to the two to five second duration of the free-fall. To simulate a microgravity environment without using the drop tower, thus significantly extending the test time from a few seconds to several minutes, a device called the Narrow Channel Apparatus (NCA) was developed at MSU. In the NCA a thin solid fuel is burned in a channel with a vertical height small enough to suppress buoyant effects. In essence, the NCA allows us to study microgravity flame behavior that is anticipated in space using a test apparatus on Earth under 1-g conditions. The Michigan State University department of Mechanical Engineering is currently running its third iteration of the NCA.
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