Bristol Composites Institute in Space
By Prof. Ian Hamerton, Prof. Byung Chul Kim, & Dr Vincent K. Maes
The high specific properties of composite materials have long made them of interest in space applications, where despite significant reductions over the years it still costs around $15 dollars per gramme of payload to get to Low Earth Orbit (LEO). However, significant challenges remain in terms of producing material systems capable of withstanding the harsh environments, manufacturing light weight components precisely, and developing innovative solutions to enabling future space missions. At the Bristol Composite Institute (BCI), several research activities are targeted at developments that will enable further utilisation of composites in space applications. These can broadly be grouped under three main challenges.
Challenge 1: Getting into Space
While the specific properties of composite materials are high, realising the true potential for lightweighting requires reliable defect free manufacturing as well as significant tailoring of the amount of material and orientation of fibres in different regions of the part. To this end, there have been two key developments at the BCI that promise to contribute to extreme light-weighting. WrapToR, or Wrapped Tow Reinforced, truss structured, led by Dr Ben Woods, combines the high specific properties of composites with the high geometrical efficiency of truss structures and the efficient and highly automatable wrapping process.
Figure 1 - Manufactured tow steered cylinder designed for improved buckling performance.
In parallel, development of fibre steered composite structures, led by Prof. Byung Chul (Eric) Kim, has had several successful steps towards commercialization. Specifically, a recent academic – industrial collaborative effort, led by the European Space Agency (ESA), which designed and manufactured Rapid Two-Steered (RTS) cylindrical structure, see Figure 1, clearly shows its potential for launch vehicles, where the design focus is not on the strength but on the structural stability during launching. The produced structure was nominated for a JEC Composites Innovation award in 2022. This study, which is now being followed by an ESA-funded project to apply the same methods to a full scale space structure in collaboration with a prime space contractor, was led by Dr Rainer Groh in collaboration with a BCI spin-out company, iCOMAT, which is commercialising Continuous Tow Shearing (CTS) technology after the techniques was first developed within a BCI research project. iCOMAT are proactively engaging with the space industry having secured £4.8M from the UK Space Agency (UKSA) and very recently a further £22.5M Series A from venture capital, a rare feat for composite start-ups.
Looking forward, next-generation automated composites manufacturing technologies are needed to enable highly efficient and complex composite structures that cannot be manufactured with current technologies. At BCI, 3D CTS technologies, see Figure 2, are under development which can manufacture complex space structures such as domes and nose cones without defects (see further reading for publication).
Figure 2 – The team at Bristol developing continuous tow stearing for 3D geometries (top) with examples of standard AFP quality (bottom left) vs CTS quality (bottom right).
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