An ISU professor is setting standards for worldwide research in powder combustion with help from national and international resources.

The four year study, which officially began Dec. 8, will make use of new technology developed by Gerald Colver, professor of mechanical engineering. The study is receiving assistance from a $395,000 grant from NASA and two scientists at McGill University in Montreal.

“This is very interesting, not only to NASA, but also to all sorts of corporate-type applications in things like the pharmaceuticals or any of the petroleum industries,” Colver said. “One thing we are setting out to do here is to be able to better characterize the flammability of a powder. That is, how explosive is it, or how much energy does it take to ignite a powder mixture?”

While it is relatively simple to characterize these properties as gases, it is more difficult for powders, which require a uniform suspension of powders to be formed within gases, he said.

“What you would do previously . is that you would grind this up, and then you would put a puff of air into it and have some sort of closed chamber, and then they would put a spark inside this thing and test it for explosion,” he said.

Colver said this method often creates different concentrations of powder in different areas of the chamber, whereas a uniform dispersion is preferred.

Over the last several years Colver has been developing an alternative technique for dispersing powder more uniformly by using electrostatics.

By putting the powder between two parallel plates and charging them with 5,000 to 10,000 volts of electricity, a very uniform cloud is produced for most powders, he said.

“We’re the only ones who use this technique,” Colver said. “It turns out that even though we can produce these very uniform suspensions of powders we still get gradients [in the concentration of the suspension].”

The project will be in collaboration with John Lee, laboratory director and Samuel Goroshin, laboratory senior research associate, he said. The two are members of the Shock Wave Physics and Combustion Research Laboratory at McGill University.

Goroshin said he, Colver and Lee filed the proposal to NASA jointly and plan to work together on the experiments, which may someday be conducted aboard the International Space Station.

“A large part of the International Space Station is dedicated to microgravity research, and about 25 percent of that is related to combustion,” he said.

Goroshin said although having their experiments conducted in the space station is a possibility, they would begin their microgravity research on the ground.

Such experiments would be a drop-tower test, Colver said, which is set up in a container, and measurements are taken during a low gravity free fall. He said the disadvantage is the fall only lasts about two to three seconds.

The experiment would eventually be taken aboard a KC-135 aircraft, which can achieve micro-gravity conditions by flying in long arcs, Colver said.

“It flies in parabolas just as a rock would fly if you threw it,” he said. “If you were sitting on that rock, you wouldn’t feel any gravity. If you were inside the aircraft you would be floating around as if there’s no gravity because you’re actually falling at the rate of gravity.”

Experiments aboard the KC-135 can last as long as 30 seconds, Colver said.

Goroshin said there are many practical applications of the research.

“By burning powders, we can produce valuable materials,” he said, “for example, nano-ceramics.”

Goroshin and Colver both agreed workplace safety would be benefited by this new process for powder testing, particularly in pharmaceutical and petrochemical industries where powders are used in large amounts.

“The goal would be to perfect this as a standard,” Colver said. “No matter what field you’re in, you need high standards to measure against. We’re trying to fill in the gap on stuff that couldn’t be studied before.”