Abstract
Drop towers provide brief terrestrial access to microgravity environments. When exploited for capillary fluidics research, the drop tower allows for unique control over an experiment’s initial conditions which can enable, enhance, or otherwise improve methods to study capillary flows and phenomena at significantly larger length scales than can be achieved on the ground. In this work, a new, highly accessible, 2.1-s tower design is introduced for such research. Enabled in part by simple macro-fabrication methods, a variety of new demonstrative experiments are presented for purely capillarity-driven flows leading to droplet ejections, bubble ingestions, sinking flows, particle injections, and multiphase flows. Due to the repeatability of the passive flows, each experiment may be used in turn as a means to study other phenomena, and forward-looking research themes are suggested that include large-length-scale passive phase separations, heat and mass transfer, and droplet dynamics.
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Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank NASA and the NASA Oregon Space Grant Consortium for support of undergraduate team members B. Oaks, T. Milhelm, C. Poanessa, R. Quesada, and B. Wiles. The work was in part completed under NASA cooperative agreement NNX09AP66A and NASA/Oregon Space Grant Consortium grant NNX10AK68H.
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Wollman, A., Weislogel, M. New investigations in capillary fluidics using a drop tower. Exp Fluids 54, 1499 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00348-013-1499-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00348-013-1499-1