An open carbon–phenolic ablator for scientific exploration

Abstract

Space exploration missions rely on ablative heat shields for the thermal protection of spacecraft during atmospheric entry flights. While dedicated research is needed for future missions, the scientific community has limited access to ablative materials typically used in aerospace. In this paper, we report the development of the HEFDiG Ablation-Research Laboratory Experiment Material (HARLEM), a carbon–phenolic ablator designed to supply the need for ablative materials in laboratory experiments. HARLEM is manufactured using polyacrylonitrile-based carbon fiber preforms and a simplified processing route for phenolic impregnation. We characterized the thermal protection performance of HARLEM in arcjet experiments conducted in the plasma wind tunnel PWK1 of the Institute of Space Systems at the University of Stuttgart. We assessed the performance of the new material by measuring surface recession rate and temperature using photogrammetry and thermography setups during the experiments, respectively. Our results show that HARLEM’s thermal protection performance is comparable to legacy carbon–phenolic ablators that have been validated in different arcjet facilities or in-flight, as demonstrated by calculations of the effective heat of ablation and scanning electron microscopy of as-produced samples. In-house manufacturing of carbon–phenolic ablators enables the addition of embedded diagnostics to ablators, allowing for the acquisition of data on internal pressure and more sophisticated pyrolysis analysis techniques.