Effect of throttling on interface behavior and liquid residuals in weightlessness

Abstract

An experimental investigation was conducted to study liquid-vapor interface behavior and subsequent vapor ingestion in a flat-bottomed cylindrical tank following a single-step throttling in outflow rate in a weightless environment. A throttling process in which the final Weber number was one-tenth of the initial Weber number tended to excite large-amplitude symmetric slosh, with the amplitude generally increasing as initial Weber number increased. As expected, liquid residuals were lower than those obtained without throttling and, for moderate values of initial Weber number, could be adequately predicted by assuming that all draining took place at the final Weber number. At large values of Weber number, residuals tended to be lower than this predicted value