Water-washout tooling for improved high- to very-high-temperature manufacturing of SM-3 TSRM composite motor cases

Nevada Composites has developed Green-AeroSM tooling, lightweight ceramic tooling that is stable under high pressure and long-duration cure cycles and can be washed out with water after cures to the highest resin-matrix-composite cure temperatures. The proposed Phase II program would build on the successful work in Phase I toward creation of a washout mandrel for the upper stage rocket motor of a land-based Aegis missile and bring it to the level of producing a full-scale motor-case mandrel prototype for testing and evaluation. We will undertake a series of tasks that will progress the technology toward the goal of adapting our Green-Aero(sm) tooling to move from shop- and small-run production to producing manufacturing quantities of robust, reproducible, readily manufacturable mandrels at reduced cost and shortened lead times. We further will be working to insuring that an increase in case cure temperatures will not require changing the washout mandrel solution derived for lower cure temperatures. We will also be developing a manufacturing cost model to estimate production costs and evaluate where efforts at further manufacturing improvements should be concentrated in Phase III. In this Phase we anticipate moving the TRL of 4-5 to 7 and the MRL from about 5 to 7.