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Compression After Impact Testing of Sandwich Composites for Usage on Expendable Launch Vehicles

Materials and Processes Laboratory, Marshall Space Flight Center, Alabama, US

^* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: alan.t.nettles{at}nasa.gov.

	Abstract

Composite material usage is necessary on NASA’s future launch vehicles in order to obtain a low mass vehicle. While aircraft and launch vehicles that utilize load-bearing composite components have many similar damage tolerance requirements, the distinct differences between a part that has a lifetime of 500 s (one launch) and can be inspected in detail before use and one that has a lifetime of many tens of thousands of flight hours and can only undergo a ‘walk around’ inspection before each flight (commercial transport) needs to be taken into account. This article presents these differences and uses data from the ARES I composite interstage as an example of how to arrive at preliminary compression after impact strength values for the sandwich structure in the acerage of this part using residual strength curves. Results show that if severity of damage can be quantified by a nondestructive method (other than dent depth), the mass of the structure can be reduced due to better characterization of the damage.

First published on October 13, 2009
Journal of Composite Materials 2009, doi:10.1177/0021998309349550


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