Materials and Fluids Under Low Gravity: Proceedings of the IXth European Symposium on Gravity-Dependent Phenomena in Physical Sciences Held at Berlin, Germany, 2–5 May 1995 (Lecture Notes in Physics)

This careful selection of papers gives the reader an overview of the main research topics investigated at the conference and recent progress in understanding the physical phenomena involved. These lectures should therefore be a prime source of information for the expert as well as for graduate students. They cover critical point phenomena and adsorption, solidification, crystallization, static fluids and thermophysical properties, fluid dynamics and combustion. The importance of gravity as an experimental parameter and a variable in a large diversity of physical phenomena and processes has been recognized for some 25 years. The growth of this field of physics can be gleamed from the great number of satellites, sounding rockets, terrestrial trop towers, etc., that exist. New critical phenomena observed under weightlessness....Pages 3-25 Numerical solutions of thermoacoustic and buoyancy-driven transport in a near critical fluid....Pages 27-40 Adsorption kinetics and exchange of matter at liquid interfaces and microgravity....Pages 41-50 Critical depletion of pure fluids in colloidal solids: Results of experiments on EURECA and grand canonical Monte Carlo simulations....Pages 51-59 Dendritic growth measurements in microgravity....Pages 63-75 A study of morphological stability during directional solidification of a Sn−Bi alloy in microgravity....Pages 77-94 Response of crystal growth experiments to time-dependent residual accelerations....Pages 95-104 Growth of 20 mm diameter GaAs crystals by the floating zone technique during the D-2 Spacelab Mission....Pages 105-113 Microstructure evolution in immiscible AlSiBi alloys under reduced gravity conditions....Pages 115-133 Crystallization in solutions: Effects of micogravity conditions....Pages 137-154 An investigation of the perfection of lysozyme protein crystals grown in microgravity and on earth....Pages 155-170 Fluid-dynamic modelling of protein crystallyzers....Pages 171-194 Plasma crystals....Pages 195-217 Are liquids molten solids or condensed gases?....Pages 221-231 Containerless processing in space: Recent results....Pages 233-252 The effect of natural convection on the measurement of mass transport coefficients in the liquid state....Pages 253-259 Proboscis container shapes for the USML-2 interface configuration experiment....Pages 261-270 Response of a liquid bridge to an acceleration varying sinusoidally with time....Pages 271-279 Nonuniform interfacial tension-driven fluid flows....Pages 283-298 Pure thermocapillary convection in a multilayer system: First results from the IML-2 mission....Pages 299-311 On vibrational convective instability of a horizontal binary mixture layer with Soret effect....Pages 313-321 Thermocapillary convection in liquid bridges with a deformed free surface....Pages 323-329 Onset of oscillatory Marangoni convection in a liquid bridge....Pages 331-341 Convection visualization and temperature fluctuation measurement in a molten silicon column....Pages 343-349 The micro wedge model: A physical description of nucleate boiling without external forces....Pages 351-359 Theoretical models for boiling at microgravity....Pages 361-370 Chemically driven convection in the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction....Pages 371-384 Combustion processes under microgravity conditions....Pages 387-400 Flat plate diffusion flames: Numerical simulation and experimental validation for different gravity levels....Pages 401-413 High pressure droplet burning experiments in reduced gravity....Pages 415-424 The papers in this text view the main research topics investigated at the European symposium and progress in understanding the physical phenomena involved. They cover such areas as critical point phenomena and adsorption, solidification, crystallization, and static fluids.