The near weightlessness of a material in the reduced gravity environment of space offers the opportunity of melting and cooling glass forming compositions without a container. This reduces the heterogeneous nucleation/crystallization which usually occurs at the walls of the container, thereby, extending the range of glass forming compositions. Based primarily on this idea, containerless glass forming experiments, which used a single axis acoustic levitator/furnace (SAAL), were conducted on SPAR rocket flights, 6 and 8, and on Space Shuttle mission, STS-7 and STS-61A. The experiments on the Space Shuttle were designed to include other studies related to melt homogenization and mixing, development of techniques for preparing uncontaminated preflight samples, and simple shaping experiments.
Containerless processing of glass forming melts in space
1988-10-01
Sonstige
Keine Angabe
Englisch
Research on Containerless Melts in Space.
AIAA | 1986
|Containerless processing of glass
NTRS | 1981
|Containerless Processing in Space: Recent Results
British Library Conference Proceedings | 1996
|Containerless-Processing Module
NTRS | 1984
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