SBIR-STTR Award

Nevada Composites has developed Green-AeroSM tooling?lightweight ceramic tooling that is stable under high pressure and long-duration cure cycles and can be washed out with water after cures. Tools have a composite-compatible Coefficient of Thermal Expansion (CTE), provide tight tolerances, are free-standing, and are of affordable cost. For BMDS applications Green-AeroSM offers both improved performance and cost improvements estimated at about 25% over sand mandrels. With development, it will offer enabling technology?the most affordable solution for high temperatures and the only solution for very-high-temperature washout mandrels. For the upper stage rocket motor of a land-based Aegis missile it will permit higher-temperature designs offering weight reductions in both internal insulation and external thermal protection?without tooling redesign and at reduced cost. It will also be applicable to other BMDS boosters. Our current process, however, has not been adapted to the particular requirements of BMDS propulsion systems. It is shop-scale and touch-labor intensive. The goal in Phase I is to advance the current TRL of 3 for BMDS applications to 4-5 in Phase I, and to a TRL of 6-7 in Phase II, when it will be transferred to propulsion contractors. Approved for Public Release 14-MDA-8047 (14 Nov 14)

Nevada Composites has developed Green-AeroSM tooling, lightweight ceramic tooling that is stable under high pressure and long-duration cure cycles and can be washed out with water after cures to the highest resin-matrix-composite cure temperatures. The proposed Phase II program would build on the successful work in Phase I toward creation of a washout mandrel for the upper stage rocket motor of a land-based Aegis missile and bring it to the level of producing a full-scale motor-case mandrel prototype for testing and evaluation. We will undertake a series of tasks that will progress the technology toward the goal of adapting our Green-Aero(sm) tooling to move from shop- and small-run production to producing manufacturing quantities of robust, reproducible, readily manufacturable mandrels at reduced cost and shortened lead times. We further will be working to insuring that an increase in case cure temperatures will not require changing the washout mandrel solution derived for lower cure temperatures. We will also be developing a manufacturing cost model to estimate production costs and evaluate where efforts at further manufacturing improvements should be concentrated in Phase III. In this Phase we anticipate moving the TRL of 4-5 to 7 and the MRL from about 5 to 7.