Abstract
A crucial component of space vehicles is the thermal protection system (TPS), which protects the vehicle from extreme heat loads. Morphological variations in TPS materials arising from manufacturing processes affect the effective properties of TPS materials. To quantify the variability, property distribution functions are obtained through a combination of X-ray computed tomography (XRCT) and a mesoscale property toolkit that is developed to rapidly process hundreds of structures from primary XRCT scans. Ten different primary volumes of FiberForm, a fibrous carbon-based ablative TPS material, are scanned using XRCT to generate primary volumes. The toolkit extracts, cleans, and repairs extracted volumes from the full primary volumes to generate material property statistics. A novel algorithm to calculate fiber diameters is also developed as part of the toolkit. The property distribution functions are calculated over a range of extracted cubic volumes. The geometrical material properties are found to not converge to a single value even after the length of the extracted cubic volume reaches a length of 300 µm, the representative elementary volume (REV) of FiberForm. Rather, the properties converge to a distribution function. The distribution functions of extracted volumes with a length of 300 µm or larger converge with 100 samples and seven primary XRCT scans. The property distribution functions for surface area, closed volume, porosity, volume-by-area ratio, mean, and standard deviation of the fiber diameters of the material are fit to a beta, log-normal, normal, Weibull minimal, triangular, and gamma functions, respectively. These property distribution functions provide more representative effective properties of the material, instead of a single value that would not capture any variability in the material. The material property distribution functions obtained from this study can be used to understand the performance of materials and improve the reliability and quantification of numerical simulations used for the design of TPS materials.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 112055 |
| Journal | Composites Part B: Engineering |
| Volume | 292 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Mar 1 2025 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2024 Elsevier Ltd
Funding
This work was supported by a Space Technology Research Institutes grant from NASA's Space Technology Research Grants Program under grant number 80NSSC21K1117. We would also like to thank the University of Kentucky Center for Computational Sciences and Information Technology Services Research Computing for their support and use of the Morgan Compute Cluster and associated research computing resources. This work was performed in part at the U.K. Electron Microscopy Center, a member of the National Nanotechnology Coordinated Infrastructure (NNCI), which is supported by the National Science Foundation, United States (NNCI-2025075). This work was supported by a Space Technology Research Institutes grant from NASA’s Space Technology Research Grants Program under grant number 80NSSC21K1117 . We would also like to thank the University of Kentucky Center for Computational Sciences and Information Technology Services Research Computing for their support and use of the Morgan Compute Cluster and associated research computing resources. This work was performed in part at the U.K. Electron Microscopy Center, a member of the National Nanotechnology Coordinated Infrastructure (NNCI) , which is supported by the National Science Foundation ( NNCI-2025075 ).
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| Kentucky Transportation Center, University of Kentucky | |
| National Aeronautics and Space Administration | 80NSSC21K1117 |
| National Science Foundation Arctic Social Science Program | NNCI-2025075 |
Keywords
- Material statistics analysis
- Mesoscale property toolkit
- Property distribution functions
- XRCT
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Ceramics and Composites
- Mechanics of Materials
- Mechanical Engineering
- Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering