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>> The ACME is a project that has been several years
in the making where we're working to study various forms
of gasses to fusion flames, learning more
about efficient energy production of pollution control.
The ACME experiment has broken
into five separate sub-experiments each
of which address different aspects of fire and fire safety.
Four of them are really focused
on pollution control, energy efficiency.
There's different kinds of experiments,
some are reference experiments designed to produce the datasets
to be amenable to later analysis and others are looking
at particular phenomena than specific issues
that control flame stability or soot release.
And finally one is addressed towards fire safety
in spacecraft in trying to see if there's a good model we use
on the ground for spacecraft flammability.
All of the experiments use a gaseous fuel
in a gaseous ambient environment.
And they're what we call the diffusion flames which is
where the fuel and the oxidizer are not premixed before
combustion, so they then merge by diffusion
and from the flame boundary.
However, after that the similarity ends,
so we have spherical flames suspended about burners,
we have gas jet flames and we have even flames
where we have inverted the background, so the fuel is
in the ambient and the oxidizer is coming out the nozzle.
These are carefully crafted experiments
where we spend years refining the way we'll do the experiments
in the test matrices and how we can merge them all
into one piece of apparatus
and those combined experiments are all executed sequentially
with teams on the ground working with the astronauts
to ensure we do make the most efficient use
of the time we have on orbit.
This insert will go in the CIR chamber
with the associated burner for each experiment
and the crew will set it up for us, install the gasses
and make other connections necessary
and then it will be tele-operated
from the ground here at NASA Glenn.
And so the principal investigators will have
immediate access to the data from each test and you can use
that to control the next test point.
Each of the ACME experiments, of which there are five,
all have university principal investigators
and they have often other co-investigators, comprising,
a large team of investigators
that will be actively tracking every test point and comparing
to the models to take the best test points as we go.