Production, Testing, and Production Analysis of 3D Printed Carbon/Carbon Frusta

The current Carbon/Carbon (C/C) industrial base is woefully incapable of supporting demand from the adoption of hypersonic systems. These limitations present themselves in three key areas: The production of legacy C/C components is fundamentally incompatible with achieving high production volumes, with intense human involvement and long production timelines. Reliance on intricate human-centric production processes results in production processes that are essentially impossible to control and rely on for consistent products. Simplistic layups and geometries produced by existing preform development fundamentally limit vehicle performance. These issues are continually noted in the rhetoric provided by the upper levels of the Department of Defense. The National Hypersonics Initiative, coming from Mr. Mike White’s office, identifies this affordable capacity as a critical capability for the future adoption of hypersonics. By leveraging an automated process, 3D Printing C/C brings the potential for inherent consistency and scalability by scaling machines rather than people. This is magnified by a lack of tooling that enables rapid start-up and low initial costs in development phases. Finally, 3D printing enables intricate components and fiber paths that can power the next generation of capability in hypersonic platforms. In the Phase I of this program, Mantis Composites demonstrated a key densification capacity that enables an existing C/C 3D Printing capability to produce consistent and high-quality C/C materials. This Phase II doubles down on de-risking the key remaining inhibitors to adoption of 3D Printed C/C. The overarching technical objective of this Phase II is as follows: Establish the consistency and performance of 3D Printed C/C using production-relevant environments and components to enable adoption by a hypersonic program of record. This technical objective complements other funded work to scale, ground test, flight test, and model the 3D printed C/C materials produced by Mantis Composites. This full portfolio of work aims to sufficiently develop 3D printing capacity to meet the critical adoption requirements of a Program of Record (POR), enabling rapid commercialization that supports a wide variety of hypersonic needs. Of critical importance, this Phase II is focused on maturing a manufacturing process with a team that specializes in machine design, construction, and operation. Focusing on process rather than materials enables a rapid transition that directly supports TPS production for hypersonic systems.