Furthermore, because of the melt s low Prandtl number together with the low magnitude accelerations, convection does not lead to significant deviations of the temperature from the conductive state. Thus, changes in the interface shape due to changes in the thermal field will be negligible. In an actual experiment, owing to the finite length of the ampoule, there is a gradual decrease in length of the melt zone during growth. In this model, transient effects related to the change in melt length are ignored. That is, we can start the calculations by solidifying from an initially uniform composition melt.
T m denotes the melting temperature.
This term is set to the desired orientation and magnitude for the duration of the thruster firing and otherwise set to zero. These thruster firings produced an impulse acceleration with the largest component parallel to the solid-liquid interface. Before the first burn, the Seebeck signal decreases monotonically. Immediately following the burn, the signal increases rapidly and reaches a maximum about 100 seconds after the termination of the burn. The signal then decreases slowly and eventually takes on almost the same slope that it had before the burn.