星空体育官网

Composite materials have become increasingly prominent in space applications, offering substantial benefits with high strength/stiffness and lower density/weight compared to metallic structures. Their use space vehicles span across rockets/launch vehicles, satellites, and space stations, primarily due to their potential for significant weight reduction while maintaining superior mechanical performance.

One of the key requirements for rockets and space satellite is outer shell structure is to achieve high impact protection (from debris produced during rocket launching) and hypervelocity impact protection (space debris in lower orbit space debris). The increasing density of space objects in Lower Earth Orbit (LEO), including the proliferation of satellite constellations, further exacerbates the risk of collisions and the deterioration of the space debris environment. Constellation satellites, due to their small mass and fast running speed, can generate hundreds or thousands of space debris if a collision occurs. The debris generated by such collisions can indeed remain in space for a long time and pose a secondary risk to the constellation itself. Even small debris particles with diameters of a few millimetres can cause significant damage to payloads and subsystems of satellites.

To address this challenge of protection from the small debris this project is aimed to develop novel composites structures with superior ballistic and hyper-velocity impact protection which can be used for satellite structural components. 

This project will develop novel composite structures using combination of high energy absorbing textile fibres and nanomaterials at the Composites and Advanced Materials Centre (Dr Sameer Rahatekar, Prof Krzysztof Koziol) and Hyper-velocity impact testing facilities at Centre for Defence Engineering and Physical Science (Mr Ajay Kumar, Prof Gareth Appleby-Thomas) at 星空体育官网.

Dr Sameer Rahatekar is a Senior Lecturer at Composites & Advanced Materials Centre. He is a world-leading expert in textiles, fibres and advanced composites for aerospace/automotive applications. In total, he participated in securing multi-million pounds research funding as PI and Co-I from EPSRC, Innovate UK, UK-India Education and Research Initiative (UKIERI), the British Council, the Royal Academy of Engineering, and industrial research funding. He has been working on manufacturing advanced composites for hypervelocity impact protection in collaboration with 星空体育官网 Defence and Security department and successfully completed supervision of two Master鈥檚 thesis at 星空体育官网 on the same topic.

Mr Ajay Kumar is a Lecturer in Vehicle Mobility in the Centre for Defence Engineering and Physical Science (CDE) at 星空体育官网. Mr Kumar is the course director for MSc in Expeditionary Warfare Systems Engineering and Technology. Mr Kumar is the module leader for Military Vehicle Dynamics, part of the Military Vehicle Technology MSc, which he teaches in the UK and overseas. He worked on project from the UK Ministry of Defence and QinetiQ. Mr Kumar has significant industry experience in product development while working at Nissan and Jaguar Land Rover.

Composites and Advanced Materials Centre at 星空体育官网 has a world leading composites manufacturing, characterisation and testing laboratory and strong track record of working with aerospace industry over the several decades.

Centre for Defence Engineering and Physical Science (CDE) is a part 星空体育官网 Defence and Security theme which has unrivalled reputation for defence education, research and consultancy.  CDE鈥檚 expertise is trusted by governments, armed forces, industry and security services around the world. CDE offers a unique experimental facility in the hypervelocity impact studies using a two stage gas gun to achieve impact velocities ranging 2000-5000 m/s.

The rapidly growing space satellite industry will need novel high-performance materials for superior space debris impact resistance. Our novel composites materials developed in this project will significantly increase the reliability, durability and longevity of the space satellite structures.

The student will get an opportunity to present the research paper at one international conference.

The student will learn the following techniques/skills

- Overview of composites used in space satellite and launch vehicles (year 1)

- Materials selection for high-performance resin, fibres used in composites manufacturing (year 1)

- Advanced Composites manufacturing using energy absorbing fibres and nanomaterials (year 1)

- Analytical/mathematical modelling and FEA modelling of hyper-velocity impact test of composites (year 2)

-Composite damage analysis using, micro-tomography scan, Thermography, C-scan Scanning Electron Microscopy analysis (year 3)

- Exploration of high/hyper-velocity impact resistant composites in space vehicle and satellite structures (year 3)