Assessment of the manufacturing feasibility of a flexible thermal protection aeroshell by filament winding technique

The study relates to the filament winding of a flexible conical aeroshell that belongs to the deployable thermal protection system for the controlled re-entry and safe recovery of CubeSat class satellites. A review of the flexible thermal protection systems made it possible to allocate materials for deployable mechanisms into a separate group by highlighting their principal features. Following the review, the filament winding of conical structures does not pose significant difficulties, except for the limitations in the available fiber paths and lack of data on the tow tension fluctuations during the manufacturing process. In the study, the available fiber paths for two configurations of the conical aeroshell were compared with the principal stress distributions expected during the operation of the flexible thermal protection system. The stress distributions have been evaluated by several theories related to the bending of thin plates or membranes under transverse load. It was shown that the stress distributions did not agree with the stiffness distribution of the filament wound structure, which was computed by the methods adopted in the classic lamination theory. The effect of various machine paths on the tow tension fluctuations was studied experimentally for the conical structures with the help of a laboratory 4-axis filament winding machine. The analytically computed machine path, which does not require a mechanism to rewind the tow over the packages during the winding process, was used to manufacture a small-scale flexible aeroshell. The features of the wound flexible aeroshell were discussed in conclusion.