Thermal Protection System -Materials

Music
Ambience: F-15 Jet

High-speed flights, missions to Mars, landing a space shuttle these all involve aircraft that are made with materials that can withstand very high temperatures. But is there one kind of heat shield that would work for all of these applications? I’m Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet. John Balboni is an engineer at Ames Research Center, where he tests materials designed to protect aircraft.

“My wife says, “Why don’t you just design one heat shield, and then, just use it on all the spacecraft,” and it’s a little hard to answer that question. It would be like saying you could design one racecar for all types of races, including drag racing and street racing and racing around a racetrack. There are different racecars for different missions, right? And there are different aircraft for different missions too. We have commercial aircraft that carry people, and we have cargo aircraft, and we have small planes and big planes. So the same thing applies for heat shields. There is not one heat shield that would work for all applications and every mission that you could think of.

The types of materials used for thermal protection on aircraft fall into two categories. There’s reusable materials, and then there are ablating materials. A reusable material, a good example is the space shuttle heat shield. There are tiles that cover the outside of space shuttles, and those are designed to be reused. In other words, the shuttle flies back, and it’s remounted on the rocket, and it flies again with the same heat shield. And, in fact, that can be done dozens of times. Now, there’s another class of materials that are used for heat shields that are called ablating materials. Those are going to be subjected to much higher heating and temperatures, and as such, they will melt. They will burn and they just must do that at a controlled rate at a rate at which there will still always be some material left during the flight so that there’s some material left to protect the vehicle.”

Pulse of the Planet is made possible by the National Science Foundation, with additional support from NASA. I’m Jim Metzner.

Thermal Protection System -Materials

Find out why thermal protection on aircraft is not "one size fits all"!
Air Date:07/17/2007
Scientist:
Transcript:

Music
Ambience: F-15 Jet

High-speed flights, missions to Mars, landing a space shuttle these all involve aircraft that are made with materials that can withstand very high temperatures. But is there one kind of heat shield that would work for all of these applications? I’m Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet. John Balboni is an engineer at Ames Research Center, where he tests materials designed to protect aircraft.

“My wife says, “Why don’t you just design one heat shield, and then, just use it on all the spacecraft,” and it’s a little hard to answer that question. It would be like saying you could design one racecar for all types of races, including drag racing and street racing and racing around a racetrack. There are different racecars for different missions, right? And there are different aircraft for different missions too. We have commercial aircraft that carry people, and we have cargo aircraft, and we have small planes and big planes. So the same thing applies for heat shields. There is not one heat shield that would work for all applications and every mission that you could think of.

The types of materials used for thermal protection on aircraft fall into two categories. There’s reusable materials, and then there are ablating materials. A reusable material, a good example is the space shuttle heat shield. There are tiles that cover the outside of space shuttles, and those are designed to be reused. In other words, the shuttle flies back, and it’s remounted on the rocket, and it flies again with the same heat shield. And, in fact, that can be done dozens of times. Now, there’s another class of materials that are used for heat shields that are called ablating materials. Those are going to be subjected to much higher heating and temperatures, and as such, they will melt. They will burn and they just must do that at a controlled rate at a rate at which there will still always be some material left during the flight so that there’s some material left to protect the vehicle.”

Pulse of the Planet is made possible by the National Science Foundation, with additional support from NASA. I’m Jim Metzner.