Out-of-Autoclave Composite Manufacturing of Missile Structures with Carbon Foam Tooling

The Missile Defense Agency (MDA) has identified a need to reduce weight and improve manufacturability to insure cost effectiveness for structural components of its missile interceptors. Touchstone Research Laboratory, Ltd. (Touchstone) and San Diego Composites (SDC) have teamed to combine their respective tooling and composite materials technologies to achieve this goal. Touchstone has developed a carbon foam (CFOAM®) tooling system, which can be electrically heated and which would enable out-of-autoclave manufacturing of composite structures. San Diego Composites (SDC) has developed high-temperature composite material technology for missile interceptor applications under numerous MDA SBIR programs. Combining these two technologies is the basis for the proposed effort and, if successful, will result in missile components with lower weight and cost to manufacture than the metallic baseline hardware. The opportunity to demonstrate the tooling and materials technology will be for the Standard Missile 3 (SM-3) interceptor program that is part of the Navy-based Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense System and that is manufactured by Raytheon Missile Systems (RMS). The specific identified application is the Guidance Section (GS) Housing of the SM-3 Block 2A missile that is currently under development.