Carbon-phenolic ablative materials for re-entry space vehicles: manufacturing, properties and plasma wind tunnel test

Thermal Protection Systems (TPS) are designed to protect re-entry space vehicles from the severe heating encountered during hypersonic flight through a planet’s or the earth’s atmosphere. A carbon-phenolic ablative TPS was developed, manufactured and tested with the aim of fulfilling the thermal and mechanical requirements corresponding to the actual loads experienced by a vehicle during a moon-earth re-entry. Experimental activities were carried out on two different composite systems (a resole resin coupled with a graphitic felt and a graphitic foam), and were aimed to the optimization of the manufacturing procedure and to the characterization of the mechanical behaviour and of the insulation performance of the fabricated composites. On the basis of the preliminary results, the selected ablators were tested in a Plasma Wind Tunnel (Scirocco, CIRA, Italy).