West Lafayette company lands $156K NASA contract
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A Purdue University-affiliated company has received a NASA contract to develop a way to repurpose certain spacecraft components, a process that would reduce the logistical challenge of transporting many heavy and large payloads into space.
The applications also could extend to other industries, such as aerospace, electronics and sporting goods, the university said.
The Phase I Small Business Technology Transfer contract worth $156,424 would help AnalySwift LLC fund two initiatives. One is the development of processes and hardware to disassemble spacecraft components and reassemble them for a secondary use. The other is software for multiphysics simulation and analysis of the thermoplastics used in the component repurposing.
“For example, a lunar lander support truss could become a vertical solar array support truss,” said Kawai Kwok, an associate professor in Purdue’s School of Aeronautics and Astronautics and the principal investigator in the project. “There are other applications, depending on mission needs using the same set of structural elements and innovative multiphysics modeling.”
Long-duration crewed missions to the moon, Mars and beyond require infrastructure such as trusses to be built on those surfaces, but transporting such heavy and large payloads into space presents challenges, AnalySwift President and CEO Allan Wood said.
“The AnalySwift project proposes a novel method of disassembling and reassembling thermoplastic composite joints in space,” Wood said in a news release. “Our proposed method enables reconfiguration of truss structures in space, transitioning away from the current one-time use model to a scalable and sustainable approach.”
AnalySwift, based in West Lafayette, is a developer of modeling software for composites and other advanced materials.
The initiatives that received the NASA contract have broader applications for thermoplastics, the university said.
“Advancements include developing multiphysics models and data for electrical heating and welding, including establishing relations between bonding strength and the process conditions of temperature, pressure and time,” Kwok said.
Wood said the applications could extend beyond simulation and into repair for thermoplastics. Industries that could benefit include aerospace, defense, automotive, marine, energy, electronics, sporting goods and medical devices.