Patent — available for licensing
Self-aligning Poppet
A NASA invention available to explore as a licensing opportunity.
About this technology
Overview
As NASA plans for manned missions to Mars, efforts are being made to identify technologies that must be improved to make such trips feasible. Valves have been identified as one technology in need of improvement – on the voyage to Mars, propellants and other stored materials will leak through seals in the lines, tanks, and valves. For example, traditional valve technologies are projected to result in a loss of 17 tons of hydrogen during a 6-year manned trip to Mars. Thus, to make a Mars mission (or other long duration manned space missions) feasible, cryogenic valve leakage rates must be reduced by several orders of magnitude. After identifying this need, engineers at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center set out to develop a solution. The result is NASA’s self-aligning poppet for low leakage valves – a seat alignment technology that eliminates the need to precisely control interfaces between poppet sealing surfaces and the valve seat seal. Instead, the seat and poppet self-align, ensuring the poppet is always centered, parallel to the seat, and perpendicular to the actuator line of action. Testing has shown that NASA’s self-aligning poppet reduces leakage in aerospace cryogenic valves by three orders of magnitude.