Dr. William Kaukler, a longtime NASA contractor and an associate research professor at the University of Alabama Huntsville’s (UAH) Rotorcraft Systems Engineering and Simulation Center, has been awarded a patent for an environmentally-friendly, ionic process to make carbon fiber used in ablative rocket nozzles and heat shields.
Dr. Kaukler developed the new ionic process at UAH’s Reliability and Failure Analysis Laboratory with funding from the U.S. Army’s Aviation and Missile Research, Development and Engineering Center (AMRDEC). As UAH staff writer Jim Steele explains, “to form a solid fuel rocket nozzle, layers of carbon fiber fabric made from carbonized rayon are coated with pitch and wound around a mandrel, and then heat-treated to convert the pitch to solid carbon.”
The resulting nozzle will be a carbon fiber composite. The rocket nozzles of Army missiles are made from phenolic resin and this same carbon fiber. However, unlike traditional carbon fiber, made with a precursor material known as polyacrylonitrile (PAN), Dr. Kaukler used cellulose fiber, which is important because it has a much lower rate of thermal conductivity.
