For the past 50 years, there has been a great deal of interest in using water-based explosion suppression systems to mitigate the impact of thermal explosions and their consequential overpressures. Previous researches focused on the suppression and mitigation with sprays containing droplets 200 mu m <= D32 <= 1000 mu m. The present study concerns the mitigation of slow-moving deflagrations with speeds of less than or equal to 30 m/s. Consequently, the droplets within the spray must be small enough to extract heat in the short finite moments that the flame and droplets interact at about 0.03 ms for a 1 mm thick flame front. Previous theoretical studies suggested that droplets in the order of 10 to 20 mu m would be small enough to mitigate combustion without relying on further droplet break up, although experimental trials were not performed to validate these data. This investigation, however, presents a qualitative and quantitative analysis of using spill return atomizer (SRA) to provide fine water spray ranging from 17 mu m <= D32 <= 29 mu m without relying on further breakup. The spray cone angle was increased from 34.7 degrees to 49.2 degrees and the exit orifice flow rate was raised from 0.295 to 1.36 l/min. Increasing the flow rate provided the required range of droplets with liquid volume flux of 0.011 to 0.047 cm(3)/s/cm(2) and mean droplet velocity of 0 to 21.4 m/s. Hence the resulting characteristics are required to mitigate a propagating combustion wave.