Sintered Powder Textile Surface Modification for Extreme Environments

New textile and material solutions are needed to withstand the challenging environments that will be encountered during extended duration Lunar exploration missions. In Phase I we demonstrated a novel textile technology for environmental protection garment (EPG) outer layers that leverages space-proven materials together with a novel sintered powder textile coating process to create highly flexible, dust impermeable textiles compatible with ultra-low temperature. The sintered surface layer has a structure consisting of a network of powder particles that have been fused together. This network structure offers the smooth, dust impermeable benefits of a continuous coating, but has filament-like attributes to preserve ultra-low temperature flexibility and durability. Powders for sintering are selected to match the textile substrate, to create like bonded to like surfaces that eliminate differences in thermal expansion that cause delamination of traditional coatings. Multilayer additively manufactured sintered coatings can deliver additional functionality or tailoring of the shell textile properties. The challenging set of requirements for the EPG shell material requires such an approach that leverages all aspects of textile engineering. The sinter coating process that was developed in Phase I is a robust and customizable platform technology that is compatible with emerging EPG shell textile materials and concepts. The proposed Phase II effort aims to leverage this newly developed sintered particle coating technology together with emerging textile materials in order to develop a new EPG shell textile material and validate performance against all of the requirements prescribed by NASAs active EPG development programs.