Next-Generation Self-Healing Lubricants for Liquid Cooling and Ventilation Garment Connectors

Through the proposed SBIR program, NanoSonic will design and empirically optimize self-healing microparticles that significantly extend the lifetime of silicone lubricants used within liquid cooling and ventilation garment connectors. NanoSonic’s lubricant filled microcapsules will be precisely tailored for direct compatibility within existing silicone lubricants used by team member ILC Dover and have highly elastic silicone shells that are empirically optimized to gradually break down and release highly dispersible silicone oil into existing seal and gasket greases slowly over extended, simulated tribological wear cycles. The proposed effort will directly build from NanoSonic’s self-healing coating microcapsules and have direct commercial scalability using established oil-in-water suspension polymerization reactions. In support of a low-risk Phase III transition, the proposed self-sealing HybridSil® microcapsules will be intrinsically designed for near term 55-gallon production quantities within an established manufacturing infrastructure. NanoSonic’s lubricant filled microcapsules will directly build from its established self-healing polymeric capsule materials. This capsule technology was uniquely tailored to provide aerospace topcoats a mechanism to autonomously heal themselves from laceration, puncture, and abrasion threats in addition to having long-term environmental durability. NanoSonic is currently working to transition this technology to multiple defense prime and government groups for direction integration into polyurethane aerospace topcoats such as MIL-PRF-85285E.

Building from a successful Phase I effort, NanoSonic will use a Phase II program advancement to further optimize and commercially transition its self-healing microcapsules for LCVG connectors. Working with ILC Dover, numerous additional NASA applications will be pursued including docking systems and vehicle hatches within current and future space vehicles.

Non NASA applications include a broad spectrum of aircraft and aerospace seals numerous applications including engines, landing gear, and flight controls.

This is early/mid-stage (TRL 3) — the most realistic path in is NASA SBIR/STTR, which funds small businesses and research institutions to develop technology aligned with NASA's needs (equity-free, phased funding). Check whether a current SBIR/STTR solicitation topic overlaps with this project's technology area, or contact the project directly (above) to ask.

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