Development for Thermophoresis Experimental Under Microgravity Condition

In the temperature field, a small particle will move towards the lower temperature side. This phenomenon is called thermophoresis, which influences the movement of soot particles in exhaust gas from combustors. It is important to understand the behavior of soot particles in the combustion field for emission control. The main problem for measuring the thermophoretic velocity is the natural convection. The velocity of such natural convection is usually comparable to the thermophoretic velocity and cannot be measured directly. To avoid this problem, experiments should be conducted under microgravity conditions.. In the present work, device has been developed for conducting experiments repeatedly under a microgravity environment in a very short period time, i.e. 0.3 s, by means of the free-fall method, to accumulate data of the thermophoretic velocity. Experiments have been conducted to measure the movement of particles in the microgravity environment with and without temperature gradient. For the former experiment, it is seen that the particles has almost no movement in the horizontal and the vertical directions. Results confirmed that there is negligible effect of blowing and gravitational on the particles movement. For the later one, experiments have been done in a surrounding of a pure gas of argon. The thermophoretic velocity is measured at 313 +/- 2 K for various pressure conditions from 20 kPa to 100 kPa. The thermophoretic velocity for each particle is individually measured, and the mean value and its 95% confidence interval for each experimental condition are statistically obtained. Result from experiments are compared with the theory and satisfactorily agreement is found for tested gas.