Capillary Flow in Cylindrical Containers with Rounded Interior Corners

Interior corners are common constructs employed in ∞uid systems aboard spacecraft to passively control large length scale capillary-dominated liquid inventories, i.e. fuel/cryogen storage tanks. Due to either design or fabrication, an ideally sharp corner may not be achieved, but rather a somewhat rounded one. In this work, low-gravity drop tower tests are performed to benchmark recent analytical results predicting capillary driven ∞ows along interior corners possessing any degree of roundedness. The analysis provides closed-form solutions that predict meniscus tip location and ∞ow rate as a function of system geometry and ∞uid properties and is easily verifled by low-g test. In this paper, a summary of the analytical solutions is followed by drop tower experimental results for the problem of sudden imbibition in containers possessing interior corners of varying roundedness. Digitized data such as meniscus tip location and transient free surface proflle are presented. It is shown that the predictions compare well with experiment, the former of which may be employed for the immediate and time-e‐cient design and analysis of current and advanced low-g ∞uids management systems.