RF Guidance Sensor Windows for High-Speed and Hypersonic Air Vehicles

Advanced Cerametrics, Inc (ACI) has developed a technology to make nearly any ceramic into flexible fiber. ACI has also developed a material that meets the needs of hypersonic missile radomes (barium alumino silicate-BAS). ACI has developed a method to make the BAS into fiber form and to produce fibrous monoliths of BAS where the BAS fibers reinforce a similar BAS matrix. These components have a low dielectric constant suitable for radome RF requirements. The BAS materials, especially in fiber monolith form, have a very good CTE with high temperature capability above 2700 F. The fibrous monoliths can be back filled with an aluminum phosphate slurry to form a graded structure sandwich to improve the density and toughness to resist rain erosion and mechancial stresses. The work in this SBIR will continue ACI's work begun on the BAS to make functioning hypersonic missile radomes by the end of Phase II.