Woven TPS A Revolutionary Approach to Tailorable TPS Design & Manufacturing for Thermal Management Systems & Entry, Descent & Landing Systems, Year 1

The thermal protection material system (TPS) is the barrier that protects the space vehicle from atmospheric entry heating. Woven TPS is a concept that leverages the mature weaving technology that has evolved from the textile industry to design TPS with tailorable performance by varying a material's composition and properties by the controlled placement of fibers within a woven structure. The woven TPS approach that is being proposed has the capability to address two of the major challenges faced by NASA's TPS community: 1. The inability to optimize a TPS material for a given mission due to the high costs and long schedules associated with material development and certification. This drives NASA to utilize unoptimized TPS materials for a given mission which can result in significant weight penalties; 2. The typical scenario wherein NASA TPS materials have no other government or commercial applications and do not utilize manufacturing processes leveraging common commercial processes. Given that there are few NASA missions, and that these missions are years apart, this results in NASA incurring high costs to maintain manufacturing infrastructure or incurring the cost and risk of restarting manufacturing. The woven TPS approach has the potential to tailor a material's properties by the accurate placement of fibers of different composition with different spacings utilizing commercially available weaving technology, including equipment, modeling and design tools to optimize the weave. This allows for the control of material composition and density in three dimensions, resulting in tailored material performance. Given that the constituent properties of the fibers are known, in the future with modified tools it should be possible to predict the material's performance. This should result in a material that can be optimized for a given mission, and although some testing will still be required to certify the final product for the mission, it should substantially reduce the overall testing requirements and hence reduce the cost and schedule.

NASA aeronautics will continue to be recognized as developing crosscutting, innovative research that will benefit the nation, and UTM is just the latest in a long history of contri-butions. UTM civilian applications, over time, will likely include agricultural monitoring, weather, rail surveillance, search and rescue, aerial photography, cargo delivery and low altitude radar among other applications. NASA has started the process in this area of re-search, and is stepping up the momentum as a positive response has been received from the community.

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.

None of these are guaranteed paths for this specific project — TechPort itself doesn't have an "apply" button. Reaching out to the contact(s) above with a specific question is usually the fastest way to find out what's actually open.