Manufacturing and Strength Improvement for Thick Carbon-Carbon Laminates

The aerospace community has recently been successful in making complex large scale, hot structure carbon-carbon (C-C) assemblies for high speed aerospace vehicles. However, lessons learned from these programs revealed many issues that need to be overcome in order to further improve the design margins and to reduce performance risks for future applications.The overall objective of the program is to improve the strength and consistency of thick C-C laminates used on large scale, load bearing airframe structures. With strength properties as the focus of improvements, improved properties will give more analytical confidence during the design phase of programs.In this program, we propose to leverage our past experiences and to develop new class of C-C composites that meet the overall objective of the program. Test panels and demonstration article, aiming to achieve improved properties, will be designed, fabricated and then tested to check property improvement, property consistency and materials affordability in cost and lead time.