Abstract
In the past years microgravity has been developed to an environment for applied and basicresearch. In the beginning and up to now materials processing has been in the foregroundwith respect to industrial application. For the processing itself heat and mass transfer is thebasic science to describe the heat and mass exchange at the solidification front or the growthof crystals properly. However, in many fields of heat transfer itself the interaction of manyparameters is so complex that simple solutions are not possible and the conservation equationcan't be applied. This is especially the case in two phase heat transfer, where under earthconditions the buoyancy caused by the large differences in the density between the phases areso dominant that the weeker forces substantially contributing to heat transfer are suppressed.Often this leads to an incorrect physical view of the process itself, and an inadequate mathematical description. In this presentation some examples will be demonstrated, where experimentsin microgravity reinforce our basic knowledge on in principle “wellknown” processes in heattransfer.
