Award

There is significant interest from all branches of the Department of Defense (DoD), in addition to several major Primes, for manufacturing capabilities that demonstrate rugged, high temperature resistant carbon-carbon (CC) composite thermal protection system materials for hypersonic missile systems and other defense applications. Many of the prototype vehicles being developed and demonstrated by the DoD rely on CC composites for structural performance under extreme aerothermal conditions. The rising demand for weapons that can travel at hypersonic speeds and evade tracking technologies is a major factor driving the global hypersonic weapons market and R&D sectors, such as the Conventional Prompt Strike program. As a result, increasing investments across the defense sector to strengthen defense capabilities to safeguard against foreign threats and ensure better homeland security continues to drive TPS material R&D. The long manufacturing lead times resulting from a combination of slow production processes and in-process part failures, in addition to evolving global threats necessitating ever-improving architectures for hypersonic vehicles creates a great need for improved manufacturing capability to create rapidly produced high- performance CC structures that allow for modularity of a hypersonic vehicle.In response, Triton proposes to adapt and refine its room temperature stable, high-yield prepreg and CC fabrication process for the rapid manufacture of modular, high density TPS materials. The novel matrix formulation composed of inexpensive, commercially available, and domestically sourced chemicals results in rapid densification by reducing the requirement for repeated reinfiltration cycles. With this formulation, we have produced shelf stable prepreg that requires no special storage (e.g., cold storage) and ensures uniformity and reproducibility during TPS manufacturing. The innovative multi-stage fabrication process rapidly produces rugged, high density CC parts that are highly machinable at all stages of the overall fabrication process, improving the versatility of these TPS materials for a variety of evolving hypersonics platform applications. This manufacturing capability lends itself to modular construction, and we will implement a previously demonstrated design to adjoin these modular carbon-carbon structures to produce high-tolerance architecture(s) for hypersonic vehicles.Ý