SBIR-STTR Award

Hitech products proposes research, development, and testing required to characterize strain gage attachment techniques on metallic and composite structural materials in elevated temperature environments. This program will build on existing knowledge of attachment techniques acquired through numerous development projects with aerospace and rock industries. Specifically, we intend to evaluate ceramic cement, flame spray, sputter coatings, welding, brazing, and metallizing techniques for attaching resistive and capacitive sensors to materials including titanium aluminides, nickel aluminides, ceramic matrix composites, and metal matrix composites. Specific sensors selected for evaluation will minimally include special alloy wire gages (pd-cr, fe-cr-al, etc), Boeing and GPD capacitive gages, and other gages (i.e. Clip gages) as appropriate. Evaluation of sputter pre-coats and simple sputtered gages on above material systems will also be conducted. our final objective will be prototype installations demonstrating feasibility/compatability of the attachment method with various test materials.

Completion of Phase I resulted in the development of a simple pull test apparatus which was used to screen selected adhesive systems. The selected systems were used to attach strain and temperature instrumentation to Rene '41, carbon composite and TZM materials which were successfully tested to 2500 F. The objectives of Phase II are to complete the design of the test apparatus, to add elevated temperature test capability and to refine the test procedure as a suggested test standard. The acquisition of data using the proposed standard procedure comparing various currently available attachment systems were part of this project. The results would provide bond strength and electrical characteristics of the various available adhesive systems and provide methodology for quickly evaluating a proposed adhesive system on newly developed structural materials.