Printable Heat Shield Formulations Advance Spacecraft Construction

About this technology

Overview

Innovators at NASA Johnson Space Center have developed an additively manufactured thermal protection system (AMTPS) comprised of two printable heat shield material formulations. These formulations are directly applied by 3-D printer or other robotic extrusion system, and bonded to a spacecraft to devise a heat shield suitable for atmospheric entry. This technology could significantly decrease heat shield or thermal protection system (TPS) fabrication cost and time. Current state of the art TPS manufacturing and application methods are expensive, labor-intensive, and complex. These drawbacks are primarily due to the amount of skilled, manual labor needed for form fitting and bonding individual TPS tiles across a spacecraft’s forebody – each tile comprised of differing thermal properties and layers – and includes filling the gaps in-between the tiles with an additional component formulation. This AMTPS technology can solve these challenges and may represent a game changing innovation in TPS manufacturing – away from convention-al labor-intensive, costly, long-schedule techniques and towards automa-tion. It reduces the complexity of TPS integration, and eases the produc-tion of large and specially contoured heat shields. Additionally, this tech-nology allows heat shields to be created as a single mold and prevents the need to treat the tile gaps of current heat shields, thus eliminating numerous potential failure points.