TECHNICAL COMMITTEES PRESENT THE YEAR IN REVIEW

ASA is poised to add an addition to the and physically interact with the carbon fiber Inflatable space NInternational Space Station to temporar- surface, providing an accurate representa- ily expand it from eight rooms to nine. The tion of interface properties. The nanoscale habitat ready new room will be like no other on the station, information pertaining to covalent bond dis- for deployment and will be easy to install: It’ll connect to a sociation is used to define scalable param- docking port, be filled with compressed air eters that are further integrated into damage by Harry H. Hilton and, voilà, an instant space habitat. This de- models at higher-length scales with funding ployment is the result of 15 years of research from the Office of Naval Research. The Structures Technical and development by Bigelow Aerospace of The Air Force Institute of Technology has Committee works on the North Las Vegas, Nevada, on the Bigelow Ex- been researching additive manufacturing of development and application of theory, experiment and pandable Activity Module, or BEAM. objects made from plastics and metals. Sev- operation in the design Initially scheduled for a September launch, eral specimens have been produced and ana- of aerospace structures. BEAM’s test deployment has been delayed by lyzed, such as a projectile considering opti- the June explosion of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket mization of the topology and a frame for an on its way to the ISS. Once BEAM reaches its des- icosahedron. The first product was shot into tination, it will undergo two years of intensive a concrete target and reacted in a very favor- testing in what will amount to a trial run for in- able way compared to a projectile produced flatable spacecraft, a technology that could play in the normal fashion. The second project a significant role in future human spaceflight was to analyze the performance under exter- and low-Earth orbit commercial ventures. nal loading both from a dynamic instability The inflatable spacecraft structures tech- point of view leading to chaotic behavior and nology was pioneered at NASA’s Johnson from a collapse consideration. Experiments Space Center in Houston during the 1990s un- were carried out to determine the correctness der the TransHab project. Bigelow Aerospace of the finite elements procedure. licensed the patents and with NASA’s help is MIT researchers have developed a com- poised to add this module to the ISS for three posite manufacturing technique that does not years. It is to be the first human-rated inflatable require the use of large conventional ovens or structure ever used in space. autoclaves. This was achieved by integrating an The Adaptive Intelligent Materials & Sys- aligned carbon nanotube film into the top sur- Bigelow Aerospace tems Center at Arizona State University is face of an aerospace-grade composite structure, Artist’s rendering of the Bigelow developing physics-based multiscale mod- and applying current to the carbon nanotube Expandable Activity Module eling techniques for composites and nano- film to process the composite via Joule heat- attached to the International composites, bridging atomistic to structural ing. The team conducted curing experiments Space Station. The module will be scale with funding from the Air Force Of- with common carbon fiber reinforced com- launched to the space station on a SpaceX flight. fice of Scientific Research and the Army Re- posites used in aircraft components and found search Office. A quantum-mechanics-based that the new ‘out-of-oven’ technique can yield molecular dynamics approach is being de- composites of equal or greater quality than veloped to capture stress-induced covalent conventional oven-based techniques while bond dissociation. A novel interphase model consuming 99 percent less energy during the allows the polymer molecules to entangle curing process. The researchers believe that this new “out-of-oven” approach serves as the new One-third scale model of the Bigelow benchmark for energy-efficient techniques for Expanded Activity Module, manufacturing aerospace composites. an inflatable space habitat. Manufacturers and engineering firms in the advanced composites sector can now use new software developed at Purdue Uni- versity to reduce the design cycle of materi- als and structures, and analyze models too complex for existing methods. AnalySwift, a commercial software provider based in Utah, launched SwiftComp, technology that provides efficient, high-fidelity modeling of composites and reduces analysis times with- out a loss of accuracy, while capturing de- tails of composites that were unreachable using traditional methods. The company licensed the technology, which was devel-

NASA oped at Purdue.

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