The Ablative Thermal Protection System is part of the Intermediate Experimental Vehicle (IXV) by integration of Amorim’s P50 cork composite in the project. It has been introduced in order to protect the structure of IXV from the effects of the thermal environment starting from the stand-by on ground phase, up to the atmospheric reentry and descent phases.
It was a multidisciplinary program that covered various fields, from very peculiar numerical simulations such as those on aerothermodynamics or dynamic environment, to material science problems to find the correct materials to fulfill the very demanding requirements, to technological difficulties to perform integration of hundreds of parts with required precision of a few tenth’s of a millimeter.
All these aspects were managed through the integrated work of several teams involved in the project and under the technical coordination of Thales Alenia Space Italy and ESA. The result was a flawless flight performed on the 11th of February 2015. Now the effort will be in reviewing the huge amount of flight data in order to verify the correctness of the calculation models and technological choices.
In particular, at the technologies level it qualified:
“IXV has opened a new chapter for ESA in terms of reentry capabilities and reusability.”
Due to the TPS´s high thickness all the tiles are realized by 3D machining, the P50 material is then bonded on the spacecraft structure by means of different high strength adhesives depending on the interface characteristics. Considering that the structures surface where the TPS tiles have to be bonded is made of several materials (CFRP, titanium alloys, aluminum alloys) with different surface finishing and treatment, more than ten different bonded interfaces needed to be characterized and qualified.
“This mission will teach us a lot about the technologies we need to apply in new launch systems, in particular when we think about reusable systems.”