ERG Aerospace Corporation — Department of Defense STTR Phase I: AFX20D-TCSO1

Description

Duocel® metal foam has been proven as a TRL 9 flight material. Currently, Duocel® is only available with uniform through-thickness properties, limiting the areas it can be used in advanced applications requiring optimized, spatially-varying mechanical and functional properties. This proposal covers the development of Duocel® metal foams with spatially-varying properties to establish their at-scale and at-rate fabrication using ERG’s proprietary manufacturing process. The unique structure of metal foam offers multiple performance enhancements that have been proven in many applications with aluminum and copper. The ability to spatially tailor these properties will allow optimized foam performance for applications requiring high mass and volume efficiencies.Preliminary work demonstrating the feasibility of fabricating Duocel® with step-wise property gradients shows promising results. With ERG’s 50+ years of experience engineering metal foams to meet rigorous design requirements, and Wichita State University’s vast contribution to the aerospace industry, the team is confident in their ability produce foams with spatially-varying mechanical and functional properties. Part of the Phase I effort will be to identify the material properties relevant to needs within Air Force. Potential customers generally need baseline material properties before they can select new materials, so the material characterization will be driven by experience with characterizing metal foams.