Specialty Engineered Products
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COI Ceramics, Inc. develops specialty products for your ceramic needs. One such product COIC is especially proud of is the NOAX material developed for the NASA Return to Flight program. This material was ATK SEHO delivered to Kennedy for Flight on STS-114. Astronauts successfully repaired coupons in the Shuttle Bay demonstrating the application. As a result, NOAX will be flown on all remaining shuttle flights.
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More information regarding NOAX - you will be directed away from the COIC Website... |
Discovery to experiment on crack-fixing adhesive 
The NOAX adhesive is designed to help repair damage to the shuttle's reinforced carbon-carbon, or RCC, surfaces installed along the leading edges of its wings, its nose, an area just behind the nose cap underneath the orbiter, and immediately around forward attachment points where the orbiter and external tank are connected during launch. Those areas experience the greatest temperature increases during re-entry. Astronauts also will experiment with a second repair kit designed to fix the shuttle's thermal tiles, which cover most of the remaining orbiter. The RCC surfaces are made from layers of graphite-filled rayon fabric, filled with a special resin. To prevent oxidation, the outer layers of the RCC surfaces are covered with a thin coating of silicon carbide. On Saturday, astronaut Stephen Robinson will suit up and enter Discovery's cargo bay. In the vacuum of space, he'll practice repairing cracks on as many as three samples of RCC material mounted to a special pallet in the cargo bay, Ledbetter said. Robinson will apply the adhesive using a specially designed caulking gun and scrapers similar to putty knives. If it passes muster with NASA, Riedell's and Easler's NOAX adhesive could earn a permanent place on the shuttle. And if the spacecraft ever sustains damage and needs to be repaired in space, the glue formulated here in San Diego could end up saving a future crew.
By Bruce Lieberman July 27, 2005 |
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S.D. engineers' glue gets next test in final frontier Discovery Astronauts Check Shuttle for Return to Flight Mission NASA picks shuttle repair techniques for space tests New Materials For Aging Space Shuttle Discovery Astronauts Test Heat Shield Repairs in First Spacewalk Materials - Space shuttle advances Equipping Discovery: New Tools to Return Shuttles to Flight |
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COI Ceramics, Inc. can fabricate a variety of thin shell hollow spheres of various compositions and sizes. These products are called Holospheres. They are available as loose spheres that can be added to a variety of end-user products. The spheres can also be bonded together and machined into products that are useful for various applications, or they may be bonded to other materials to produce hybrid articles. More. (hyperlink to another page) Examples of applications for Holospheres include thermal barrier layers for combustor liners, structural insulation for thermal protection systems, or structural cores in combination with CMCs to create engineered components. An example of a bonded product comprised of oxide spheres is Friable Graded Insulation or FGI. FGI can be bonded to an oxide ceramic matrix composite such as A/N720 to produce a CMC/FGI hybrid material that uses the thermal insulation properties of the FGI to increase the capability of the CMC. This has been effectively demonstrated in a land based gas turbine engine combustor liner. In this application a >20,000 hour life has been demonstrated in a Centaur 50S field test.
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