As NASA continues planning for the Journey to Mars, it is becoming increasingly apparent that the insertion of new light-weight, high-strength materials will yield significant improvements in mission affordability and scientific capability. These materials will allow vehicle designers to reduce the mass of both structural and non-structural components, which will enable them to meet the demand for increased life support and scientific payloads without increasing the overall mass of the spacecraft. While carbon fiber composites will see continued use, their specific strength and stiffness are not sufficient to meet the mass reduction requirements for the mission designs mentioned above. To address this gap, a multi-institution collaborative team has been working for the past few years to advance the properties of carbon nanotube (CNT) yarn- and sheet-based composites. This team has recently demonstrated CNT composites with uniaxial specific strengths and moduli nearly equivalent to those of state-of-the-art aerospace-grade carbon fiber composites. In an effort to accelerate the experimental progress being made, a parallel materials modeling program has also been established to provide insight into the structure and properties of this hierarchically structured material. The goal of this combined research team is to reach mechanical properties three times greater than current aerospace carbon fiber composites. This presentation describes recent progress and the current status of the modeling program, which spans the scales from atomistic molecular dynamics to systems analysis.

Role of computational materials research in the development of light-weight, high-strength carbon nanotube composites for space exploration

254th National Meeting (2017)

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