Ceramic Composites for High Temperature Aerospace Structures and Propulsion Systems

Abstract

Fiber-reinforced ceramic-matrix composites (CMCs) offer unmatched performance as lightweight, strong, high-temperature materials for power generation and aerospace. After more than 30 years of development, CMCs are about to enter service in high-temperature turbine components of commercial aircraft engines (in GE’s next generation LEAP engines). In this presentation the development of ceramic composites with optimized fiber architectures for application in hypersonics, turbine engines, and rocket nozzles will be discussed. The most extreme applications use active cooling, enabled by the use of thin textile-based hot skins that are able to tolerate extreme thermal gradients. They can also be formed into structures that enable other functionality, including transpiration and film cooling, mitigation of thermal stresses, and shape-morphing structures with potential use in combustion flow paths of hypersonic vehicles. The major challenges and strategies for realizing the potential of these ceramic composite structures will be discussed.

Biography

Ph.D in Physics, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia, 1975. Member of the National Academy of Engineering, Distinguished life member of the American Ceramic Society. Previously Principal Scientist and Senior Fellow, Teledyne Scientific Company, Thousand Oaks, CA. Research background: strengthening, toughening reliability, microstructural design and processing of advanced materials, especially fiber reinforced composites and structural ceramics. Recent research has concentrated on ceramic composites for power generation and aerospace propulsion systems. Current activities include development of 3‑D architectures for turbine blades, shape-morphing structures for hypersonics and integrated computational modeling of ceramic composites.