CompositesWorld
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An excerpt from the CW Talks interview with Chuck Miller about the genesis of polyurethane tooling board, a rewarding Industry 4.0 intro in the boatbuilding world, and an effort to break the aerocomposites inspection bottleneck. MARCH 2018 18 CompositesWorld TRENDS Q&A;: Chuck Miller, founder and president, Coastal Enterprises Editor's note: Tooling board has become a nearly ubiquitous material in composites manufacturing, particularly useful for the quick and effi- cient fabrication of plugs and molds. Chuck Miller helped bring tooling board to the industry decades ago and, in a recent CW Talks: The Composites Podcast episode, explained how he went from building rocket launch vehicles in the 1960s to developing polyurethane foam for composites. Excerpts of that discussion follow. To listen to the entire conversation, search for CW Talks on iTunes or Google play, or visit www.compositesworld.com/podcast . CW: Tell me about your work on the Saturn V moon- launch program. CM: That was in the mid-1960s. …. I was a senior manu- facturing engineer for the Saturn S-2 vehicle, which was the second stage of the Saturn V. …. My job initially was involved in the tooling, because we were building the tooling to build the Saturn. … We built 15 of them, and the first two of them were built just to try out the tooling. And so, once that happened, we morphed into other things that were manufacturing-related, and that's when my first exposure was to tooling board and something other than just iron and aluminum, etc. CW: Tell me about the type of tooling you were making for the Saturn V. CM: The whole entire Saturn V was just a gigantic fuel tank. The first stage was powered by kerosene or liquid oxygen, and the second stage — the one I was involved with — was powered with liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. And the third stage, which was made by McDonnell-Douglas, also was powered by liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. The overall Saturn V was 370 ft tall, weighed six-and-a-half million pounds at launch, and it was completely made by Boeing and by North American Aviation, who I worked for, and McDonnell-Douglas. …. But nothing had existed before because no one had launched someone into space, and certainly not to try and go to the moon. So, everything we did was state of the art because there was no art, and it was the state of a bunch of pretty young people at that time that were creating this Saturn V from nothing that had never been done in the past. CW: How did you start using composites? CM: I got into the composites because of the fuel lines that went from the liquid hydrogen tank and over and down past the liquid oxygen tank below it to each of the five engines. They [the lines] had to be covered with a fair- ing, a high-temperature fairing, that kept the launch heat from turning the liquid hydrogen into a gas. So, they were very important structures, and we had to build them out of composites because we couldn't find a metal light enough to be attached and hanging out in the breeze during launch. These fuel lines were about 20 inches in diameter and 40 ft long. They weren't tiny things. They had to be completely covered and insulated from the launch shear of the air rush- ing over the top of them. CW: As I understand it, the tools for these fairings were made with Micarta. What was it like working with Micarta? CM: Micarta was about the only thing around that could be used. Micarta was a very strong, very heavy, laminated epoxy and we used that as the actual layup tool. And then the high-temp glass and polyimides. At that point, we had a 40-ft diameter autoclave, because of all of the things that had to be bonded together. …. None of us had seen Micarta or had even tried to make a resin. CW: One of the things the Saturn S-2 required was insula- tion. Why was that, and what was used? CM: Liquid hydrogen operates to stay liquid at -423°F and it couldn't change temperature very much before it went from a liquid to a gas, so the insulation was on there to keep it cool enough. …. The first insulation package was Source | Coastal Enterprises