EXPERIMENTAL INVESTIGATION OF PYROCARBON FORMATIONS IN ABLATED LAYERS OF REINFORCED PLASTICS
V. V. Pasichnyi and V. N. Bulanov UDC 536.3:536.45 An experimental study has been made of the deposits of pyrocarbon in the process of ablation of two types of reinforced thermal-protection materials with a phenol-formaldehyde binder: glass-cloth laminate with an arrangement of the layers perpendicular to the direction of heating with a 25% content of carbon in the starting material and glass-cloth lavsan laminate with cloth layers parallel to heating (50% carbon). The experiments were conducted in a solar furnace with a 2.0 m concentrator for a constant heat flux of 50 W/cm2 modeling the heating of the bottom part of rockets. Zones of active deposition of pyrocarbon have been established by layer-by-layer chemical analysis for carbon, based on which a structural scheme of the ablating layer of glass-cloth lavsan laminate has been proposed. I. N. Frantsevich Institute of Problems of Materials Science, Kiev, Ukraine; email: pasich@ipms.kiev.ua. Translated from Inzhenerno-Fizicheskii Zhurnal, Vol. 77, No. 3, pp. 16-18, May-June, 2004. Original article submitted March 27, 2003.