LANDSAT/Bangladesh project

There are no author-identified significant results in this report

Thermal Protection System Application to Composite Cryotank Technology Demonstrator

The EM41 Thermal Protection System (TPS) team contributed to the success of the Composite Cryotank Technology Demonstrator (CCTD) manufacturing by developing and implementing a low-cost solution to apply cryoinsulation foam on the exterior surface of the tank in the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) TPS Development Facility, Bldg. 4765. The TPS team used techniques developed for the smallscale composite cryotank to apply Stepanfoam S-180 polyurethane foam to the 5.5-meter CCTD using a manual spray process. Manual spray foam technicians utilized lifts and scaffolding to access the barrel and dome sections of the large-scale tank in the horizontal orientation. During manufacturing, the tank was then oriented vertically, allowing access to the final barrel section for manual spray foam application. The CCTD was the largest application of manual spray foam performed to date with the S-180 polyurethane foam and required the TPS team to employ best practices for process controls on the development article

NASA Advances Technologies for Additive Manufacturing of GRCop-84 Copper Alloy

The Low Cost Upper Stage Propulsion project has successfully developed and matured Selective Laser Melting (SLM) Fabrication of the NASA developed GRCop-84 copper alloy

Ultrasonic assisted milling of reinforced plastics

The milling of glass and carbon fibre reinforced plastics provides manufacturers from the automotive and aerospace industry with major challenges. The high carbon and glass fibre content increases the risk of insufficient production qualities. The abrasive fibres cause cutting edge rounding which results in the issue that the comparatively thick glass fibre cannot be reliably cut, while the carbon fiber is being less of a challenge. One approach to improve the production quality is the use of ultrasonic assisted milling. At the IWF tests have been undertaken to study the influence of ultrasonic assistance on workpiece quality, cutting forces and dust generation

Cryoinsulation Material Development to Mitigate Obsolescence Risk for Global Warming Potential Foams

Cryoinsulation foams currently being qualified for the Space Launch System (SLS) core stage are nonozone- depleting substances (ODP) and are compliant with current environmental regulations. However, these materials contain the blowing agent HFC-245fa, a hydrofluorocarbon (HFC), which is a Global Warming Potential (GWP) substance. In August 2014, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed a policy change to reduce or eliminate certain HFCs, including HFC-245fa, in end-use categories including foam blowing agents beginning in 2017. The policy proposes a limited exception to allow continued use of HFC and HFC-blend foam blowing agents for military or space- and aeronautics-related applications, including rigid polyurethane spray foams, but only until 2022

Additive Manufacturing Development and Hot-Fire Testing of Liquid Rocket Channel Wall Nozzles Using Blown Powder Directed Energy Deposition Inconel 625 and JBK-75 Alloys

Additive manufacturing (AM) is being investigated at NASA and across much of the rocket propulsion industry as an alternate fabrication technique to create complex geometries for liquid engine components that offers schedule and cost saving opportunities. The geometries that can be created using AM offer a significant advantage over traditional techniques. Internal complexities, such as internal coolant channels for combustion chambers and nozzles that would typically require several operations to manufacture traditionally can be fabricated in one process. Additionally, the coolant channels are closed out as a part of the AM build process, eliminating the complexities of a traditional process like brazing or plating. The primary additive manufacturing technique that has been evaluated is powder bed fusion (PBF), or selective laser melting (SLM), but there is a scale limitation for this technique. There are several alternate additive manufacturing techniques that are being investigated for large-scale nozzles and chambers including directed energy deposition (DED) processes. A significant advantage of the DED processes is the ability to adapt to a robotic or gantry CNC system with a localized purge or purge chamber, allowing unlimited build volume. This paper will discuss the development and hot-fire testing of channel-cooled nozzles fabricated utilizing one form of DED called blown powder deposition. This initial development work using blown powder DED is being explored to form the entire channel wall nozzle with integral coolant channels within a single AM build. Much of this development is focused on the design and DED-fabrication of complex and thin-walled features and on characterization of the materials properties produced with this techniques in order to evolve this process. Subscale nozzles were fabricated using this DED technique and hot-fire tested in Liquid Oxygen/Hydrogen (LOX/GH2) and LOX/Kerosene (LOX/RP-1) environments accumulating significant development time and cycles. The initial materials that were evaluated during this testing were high-strength nickel-based Inconel 625 and JBK-75. Further process development is being completed to increase the scale of this technology for large-scale nozzles. This paper will summarize the general design considerations for DED, specific channel-cooled nozzle design, manufacturing process development, property development, initial hot-fire testing and future developments to mature this technology for regeneratively-cooled nozzles. An overview of future development at NASA will also be discussed

Development and Hotfire Testing of Additively Manufactured Copper Combustion Chambers for Liquid Rocket Engine Applications

NASA and industry partners are working towards fabrication process development to reduce costs and schedules associated with manufacturing liquid rocket engine components with the goal of reducing overall mission costs. One such technique being evaluated is powder-bed fusion or selective laser melting (SLM), commonly referred to as additive manufacturing (AM). The NASA Low Cost Upper Stage Propulsion (LCUSP) program was designed to develop processes and material characterization for GRCop-84 (a NASA Glenn Research Center-developed copper, chrome, niobium alloy) commensurate with powder bed AM, evaluate bimetallic deposition, and complete testing of a full scale combustion chamber. As part of this development, the process has been transferred to industry partners to enable a long-term supply chain of monolithic copper combustion chambers. To advance the processes further and allow for optimization with multiple materials, NASA is also investigating the feasibility of bimetallic AM chambers. In addition to the LCUSP program, NASAs Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) has completed a series of development programs and hot-fire tests to demonstrate SLM GRCop-84 and other AM techniques. MSFCs efforts include a 4,000 pounds-force thrust liquid oxygen/methane (LOX/CH4) combustion chamber. Small thrust chambers for 1,200 pounds-force LOX/hydrogen (H2) applications have also been designed and fabricated with SLM GRCop-84. Similar chambers have also completed development with an Inconel 625 jacket bonded to the GRCop-84 material, evaluating direct metal deposition (DMD) laser- and arc-based techniques. The same technologies for these lower thrust applications are being applied to 25,000-35,000 pounds-force main combustion chamber (MCC) designs. This paper describes the design, development, manufacturing and testing of these numerous combustion chambers, and the associated lessons learned throughout their design and development processes

Thermal Protection System: Spray On Foam Insulation (SOFI)

No abstract availabl

Analyses of Longitudinal Mode Combustion Instability in J-2X Gas Generator Development

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne are developing a liquid oxygen/liquid hydrogen rocket engine for future upper stage and trans-lunar applications. This engine, designated the J-2X, is a higher pressure, higher thrust variant of the Apollo-era J-2 engine. The contract for development was let to Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne in 2006. Over the past several years, development of the gas generator for the J-2X engine has progressed through a variety of workhorse injector, chamber, and feed system configurations on the component test stand at the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC). Several of the initial configurations resulted in combustion instability of the workhorse gas generator assembly at a frequency near the first longitudinal mode of the combustion chamber. In this paper, several aspects of these combustion instabilities are discussed, including injector, combustion chamber, feed system, and nozzle influences. To ensure elimination of the instabilities at the engine level, and to understand the stability margin, the gas generator system has been modeled at the NASA MSFC with two techniques, the Rocket Combustor Interaction Design and Analysis (ROCCID) code and a lumped-parameter MATLAB(TradeMark) model created as an alternative calculation to the ROCCID methodology. To correctly predict the instability characteristics of all the chamber and injector geometries and test conditions as a whole, several inputs to the submodels in ROCCID and the MATLAB(TradeMark) model were modified. Extensive sensitivity calculations were conducted to determine how to model and anchor a lumped-parameter injector response, and finite-element and acoustic analyses were conducted on several complicated combustion chamber geometries to determine how to model and anchor the chamber response. These modifications and their ramification for future stability analyses of this type are discussed

Studies in the Lake Ontario Basin using ERTS-1 and high altitude data

Studies in the Lake Ontario Basin are designed to provide input for models of river basin discharge and macro-scale features of lake circulation. Lake studies appear to require high altitude imagery to record the dynamic features of Lake Ontario so that ERTS-1 data may be interpreted. Land area studies require input of soil moisture, land use and soil-sediment-geomorphology measurements some of which appear to be available, on a regional scale from ERTS-1 products