Contamination Level Prediction: Progress in Species Separation by TGA/MS

Abstract

Molecular contamination can be detrimental to spacecraft life expectancy as it may induce changes to the properties of the surfaces on which it deposits. In order to control these potential issues, manufacturers need to assess in-flight contamination levels in the quite early design phases, possibly leading to design changes or extra material bake-out to fulfil requirements. The accuracy of model assessments may thus have direct impacts on missions and costs. Prediction of outgassing and deposition at mission timescale is done by extrapolating short-term on-ground experimental results, by fitting the latter with some empirical or physical laws. Common methods are the power law interpolation (in isothermal conditions) or the residence time approach (with thermally activated time constants), which leads to exponential decays in isothermal conditions. Although they allow fitting the measured outgassed flux over few-day-long experiments, their extrapolation to ten or fifteen-year-long missions is more challenging. Validating empirical laws might involve long-term empirical comparisons, while obviously the validation of physical models should start with checking their physics. In spite of many years trying, a basic difficulty was yet found to block significant progress on physical validation. As long as measurements are limited to the total mass on QCMs it looks possible to fit data as a sum of almost any law, such as residence time or diffusion models e.g. for outgassing. Following this observation, a conclusion was drawn that the only way to discriminate between two different physics was to characterize contamination at chemical species level. Such characterizations are a prerequisite to unravel the physics at play during several phenomena: outgassing, deposit films dynamics, photochemistry, environment/ATOX interactions, etc. This innovative approach, presented herein, aims at identifying outgassed contaminants by means of coupled thermogravimetric analysis and mass spectrometry. For this purpose, this paper reports the successful species separation and identification of contaminants outgassed from a material used in space applications: the epoxy adhesive Scotchweld EC-9323-2.