The Ares rocket which will launch the Orion crew exploration vehicle into orbit. Image credit: NASA via nasa1fan/MFSC on Flickr.
Fittingly on a day when NASA successfully fired a rocket into the moon, we turn our attention to space. More specifically, we’ll be looking at fire safety in space, which is the focus of Sonia Fereres’s research. NASA’s Constellation Program aims to send people back to the moon, then to Mars and beyond. Part of this program involves the creation of a new generation of spacecraft like the Orion crew exploration vehicle. Unlike the Space Shuttles currently in operation, whose cabin environment mimics the atmospheric pressure and oxygen concentration of earth at sea level, the new vehicles are designed to have lower pressure cabin environments with increased oxygen concentrations. Raising oxygen concentrations increases the risk of fire, a phenomenon that poses unique challenges and dangers on board spacecraft.
That’s where Sonia’s research comes in. For her Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering, she’s studying the flammability of different materials under these low pressure, high oxygen conditions. Flammability can be characterized several ways: ease of ignition, flame spread, and heat release rate, to name a few. Sonia studies the ease of ignition because the other dimensions of flammability only come into play once ignition has occurred, making it of paramount importance for fire safety.
FIST chamber
To determine the fire risk posed by these extraterrestrial conditions while remaining firmly grounded in a Berkeley laboratory, Sonia runs experiments inside a special containment chamber, the Forced Ignition and Spread Test (FIST). There, she can manipulate ambient pressure and oxygen concentration in order to compare time to ignition and sample mass loss until ignition under various conditions. This research will help establish whether reduced pressure and enriched oxygen environments pose a higher fire risk than normal atmospheric conditions, a subject of considerable interest to NASA as it develops a space program for the twenty-first century.
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