Speaker
Description
The increasing focus of the aerospace industry towards component reusability has made non-ablative material largely employed for Thermal Protection System in spacecraft atmospheric re-entry missions. In this work, special CMC TPSs obtained with ISiComp®, a Ceramic Matrix Composite (CMC) reinforced with carbon fibres, have been studied, paying special attention to the monitoring of the surface integrity. ISiComp TPS, indeed, are coated with silicon carbide (SiC) in order to enhance their high-temperature performance and to mitigate the surface erosion during re-entry phases. That is why the availability of a reliable, non-destructive methodology for the assessment of both the substrate and coating integrity—for manufacturing quality control and also for post-flight inspection after multiple missions—has become essential. ,
With this aim,NDT techniques based on Infrared Thermography (IRT) have been investigated in order to evaluate their effectiveness in assessing the surface as well as the integrity of the coating of a set of ISiComp samples. Several thermographic techniques, sensor configurations, and data analysis algorithms were implemented and systematically compared to investigate their capability in identifying material state variations. The results demonstrate that the proposed IRT-based methodology is capable of reliably discriminating between coated, uncoated, and oxidized material conditions, providing a robust and scalable framework for the health monitoring and assessment of reusable spacecraft TPS components
