Joseph Kirchhoff with his teammate Dr. Tyler Hudson have received R&D funds from NASA to purse scaling of their invention, OATMEAL.
Kirchhoff a Ph.D. candidate in mechanical engineering under Omar Ghattas and Mehran Tehrani (UCSD), and Hudson from NASA's Langley Research Center were awarded a $200k Center Innovation Fund (CIF) and Internal Research & Development (IRAD) grant to pursue scalable manufacturing of their invention OATMEAL, an aerospace-grade thermoplastic material.
OATMEAL, which stands for 'Out-of-autoclave Amorphous/semi-crystalline Thermoplastic Materials for Energy-efficient Aerospace-grade Laminates', focuses on two urgent needs: massively higher throughput for aerospace/automotive composite materials and reliable on-orbit, in-space fabrication of large structures. It specifically addresses thermoplastic composites which are bottlenecked by thermal crystallization during processing.
The pair, who met through the NASA Space Technology Graduate Research Opportunities (NSTGRO) fellowship, have been developing this technology for two years and have received patents through UT Austin and NASA. Kirchhoff has also worked with colleagues at the University of California San Diego and the University of Texas El Paso for conceptual testing and deployable structures. Some of this work has already been published at the ASME Aerospace Structures, Structural Dynamics, and Materials Conference.
With this new funding Kirchhoff and Hudson hope to reach Technology Readiness Level (TRL) 5 as they continue to investigate manufacturing opportunities of OATMEAL.
