Self Healing Hull Material For Spaceships and Space Facilities

One of the big problems for development of a true space faring civilization is how to protect the crew habitat areas and tankage from high velocity impacts. each solution usually has drawbacks as well as benefits. large thicknesses of dense metals or ceramics protect up to a point but at the cost of taking up the mass cargo fraction and requiring more powerful engines and or more fuel and oxidizer at least working fluid or plasma mass. and if you or the impactor are going fast enough it will burrow right through any way. plus the shielding mass will eventually be compromised enough that subsequent hits will get through.

if you go with a wiffel shield it's less massive but eventually it erodes to the point stuff will get through. plus the spacing of the wiffel plates is different for different velocities. it needs tuning.

another idea is a column of water ice. this has advantages. it may self heal to a degree. but it will erode, could sublimate away, and is massive too. this makes it somewhat like the first idea. though this one works as an ablative counter punch to help shed KE of the projectile.

water tankage kind of works but you don't want to lose your water from having holes poked in it. and its more known for being a radiation shield anyway.

Shear thickening fluids would kind of be ideal but again your bladder or tank needs to seal after it is punctured otherwise it drains out after it reliquifies after an impact stress is over. (it works by temporarily becoming solid when kinetic energy is applied to it.)

but now we have something that self heals. it could be used as part of a tank or bladder membrane wall or a layer in a complex hull or a space suit for that matter.


phys.org...

enjoy!

a reply to: stormbringer1701

Neat find, I wonder what the liquid they are using is, they never quite say. Either way, Flag and Star.

originally posted by: sycomix
a reply to: stormbringer1701

Neat find, I wonder what the liquid they are using is, they never quite say. Either way, Flag and Star.

they don't give a precise formula but give a fairly limited chemical family in the paper abstract blurb at the bottom of the article:

More information: Rapid, Puncture-Initiated Healing via Oxygen-Mediated Polymerization, ACS Macro Lett., 2015, 4 (8), pp 819–824. DOI: 10.1021/acsmacrolett.5b00315
Abstract
Autonomously healing materials that utilize thiol–ene polymerization initiated by an environmentally borne reaction stimulus are demonstrated by puncturing trilayered panels, fabricated by sandwiching thiol–ene–trialkylborane resin formulations between solid polymer panels, with high velocity projectiles; as the reactive liquid layer flows into the entrance hole, contact with atmospheric oxygen initiates polymerization, converting the liquid into a solid plug. Using infrared spectroscopy, we find that formulated resins polymerize rapidly, forming a solid polymer within seconds of atmospheric contact. During high-velocity ballistics experiments, additional evidence for rapid polymerization is provided by high-speed video, demonstrating the immediate viscosity increase when the thiol–ene–trialkylborane resins contact atmospheric oxygen, and thermal imaging, where surface temperature measurements reveal the thiol–ene reaction exotherm, confirming polymerization begins immediately upon oxygen exposure. While other approaches for materials self-repair have utilized similar liquid-to-solid transitions, our approach permits the development of materials capable of sealing a breach within seconds, far faster than previously described methods.

addendum: they do give the precise make up of the liquid layer.

BTW Tri-Alpha Energy corp just held a Boron based plasma in thier reactor for 5 miliseconds.

phys.org...

a reply to: stormbringer1701

I read somewhere(most likely here on ATS) that they were looking at using graphene possibly for drones. Pretty neat stuff, reminds me of the T3000.


Self Healing Graphene

BAE Systems Future Aviation Concepts

^ the more options the better.

a reply to: stormbringer1701

Wonderful links. Both of them. Combined with ablative shielding the self-sealing (stem bolts) layer has wonderful potential. And anything that puts us closer to making our own little stellar core on a workbench is a step in the right direction.

originally posted by: pfishy
a reply to: stormbringer1701

Wonderful links. Both of them. Combined with ablative shielding the self-sealing (stem bolts) layer has wonderful potential. And anything that puts us closer to making our own little stellar core on a workbench is a step in the right direction.

They will rebuild thier reactor next to do 10 billion degrees which is 1/3 the temperature needed for boron fueled fusion. so it is a big step with a lot more to go. but on another note recent discoveries about the product chain basically doubles the amount of electricity available proton boron 11 based fusion. also this is basically direct conversion so it is not based on turbines and working fluid or thermo-electric converters. the high energy alphas go through a coil and induce an electrical current in the coil. now P-B fusion is known to produce two rather than just one high energy alpha per fusion event.

a reply to: stormbringer1701

So, they're basically polishing the wood on their fireplace mantel so they'll have a nice pretty spot to show off that direct conversion holy grail in a few years. It's going to look great next to their Nobel Medal.

That was not intended to sound sarcastic, by the way. I've got over 43 hours on the clock since Monday morning, so my usual attempts at eloquence have fallen by the wayside.

a reply to: stormbringer1701
This is very interesting and should be encouraged, but the experience of ITER is that multiple new forms of instability arise when the temperature is raised. And B-p reactions require a substantially higher temperature than D-T or D-He3 ones.

It's like a reactive apoxy solvent. Create an artificial "breach" layer pnematicly circulated under the hull, that disperses one element of the pair. And another identical substrate that is released based on a pressure trigger. Wha-la!

Or we could just use the nanotube graphene memory metal that's been developed via molecular blending....Oops! Did I say that? :/

originally posted by: StanFL
a reply to: stormbringer1701
This is very interesting and should be encouraged, but the experience of ITER is that multiple new forms of instability arise when the temperature is raised. And B-p reactions require a substantially higher temperature than D-T or D-He3 ones.

there has been a lot of progress on handling instabilities in general and a lot of these small fusion community designs are build to limit or even use instabilities as a part of their design.

a reply to: stormbringer1701

Can a Magnetohydrodynamic drive produce enough EMF to propel the ubuquitious hydrogen atoms and space debris away from a spaceship hull?
Remember, space is not empty. We may have to create a sophisticated engine that deals with Dark Energy. Sucking up free energy from the emptyness of space.

Kratos

originally posted by: Kratos40
a reply to: stormbringer1701

Can a Magnetohydrodynamic drive produce enough EMF to propel the ubuquitious hydrogen atoms and space debris away from a spaceship hull?
Remember, space is not empty. We may have to create a sophisticated engine that deals with Dark Energy. Sucking up free energy from the emptyness of space.

Kratos

all you gotta do is ionize it a little then a relatively weak magnetic field can push or pull it away from the line of flight. most stuff in space is ionized anyway. and bigger stuff is exponentially rarer and rarer as it gets larger. but this would work for anything of reasonable probability of being encountered unexpectedly.

but if somehow there is a completely neutral heavy out there a sweep with a moderately powered laser would ionize it enough to be effected by the magnetic field.

for really big stuff a radar could detect it with sufficient range that an infinitesimal nudge of the maneuver thrusters cause it to become a miss even if the ship is travelling fast enough to make larger maneuvers catastrophic.

alternatively if you just pit the incoming mass the explosive out-gassing will act as a maneuvering thruster in it's own right causing the incoming object to be the thing manuevering to avoid a collision. then it has to deal with any inertial consequences of high speed course changes.

active instability supression at ITER and JET:

phys.org...

yet another way to shield radiation could be made of this possibly along with replicators, transporters and other sci fi goodness.

phys.org...