Project Manager for SAME (Smoke Aerosol Measurement Experiment), NASA Glenn Research Center, Cleveland, OH

Bill Sheredy

NASA Tech Briefs: Describe SAME and its purpose.

Bill Sheredy: It's an on-going microgravity investigation, which is designed and built for operation aboard the International Space Station. It was designed and developed by NASA at Glenn Research Center, along with ZIN Technologies, the National Center for Space Exploration Research, and the National Institute for Standards and Technology. Right now, SAME is manifested to launch aboard STS 118, or shuttle flight 13A.1, and it will be assembled and operated in the Microgravity Science Box, or MSG. It is a follow-on to the Comparative Soot Diagnostics (CSD) experiment, which flew on STS 75; its objective is to improve the reliability of future spacecraft smoke detectors by making measurements of the smoke particulate size distributions of common spacecraft materials when they burn.

The result from this experiment will enable the rational design of smoke detectors for NASA's future exploration missions. To that end, when the SAME experiment generates smoke particulates, three diagnostic measurements are taken to determine the particle size distribution for each of these smokes. The instruments used to obtain these measurements are industry standard for monitoring atmospheric particulates, but they have been modified for use in microgravity. Response data from the ISS and shuttle smoke detectors is also gathered for these sample smokes. The results of SAME provide statistics of the smoke particulate size distributions for a range of conditions and measurement of a readily modeled reference for validation of smoke growth models. The experiment design and practical applications of the data is enhanced by the development of a numerical code to predict the smoke droplet growth as a function of the fuel pyrolysis rate - the chemical change brought about by the action of heat - the thermodynamic properties of pyrolysis vapor, and the flow environment. SAME also has the capability to evaluate other fire detection/particulate devices for the test materials at NASA's request.

NTB: Why is SAME being conducted?