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Aviation History
1963
1963 - 0362.PDF
346 FLIGHT International, 7 March 1963 As reported in the first news-item below. United Technology Center have completed the fabrication of a glass-fibre motor case segment with a diameter of I56in. The actual winding is seen above, the photograph being taken at an early stage with only a little of the mandrel covered. The finished segment is seen on the left Missiles and Spaceflight UTC 156in GLASS CASE The largest segmented and jointed glass-fibre rocket-motor casing in the world, of 156in diameter, has been successfully fabricated by United Technology Center, of Sunnyvale, Calif. The case is de signed to be used either by itself, with end-closures, or as one seg ment of a longer solid-propellant motor. The filament employed in its fabrication is, say UTC, "long enough to reach from the Earth to the Sun and back twice—over 372 million miles." UTC, a division of United Aircraft Corporation, made the case at its new filament-winding facility at Coyote, Calif, about 20 miles south of San Jose, where the firm maintains a 5,200-acre development, processing and test centre for large solid, liquid, and hybrid rocket propulsion systems. A number of smaller segmented glass motors have been fired there by UTC in the past year. The filament-winding facility is capable of producing glass-fibre casings of more than 20ft diameter, states Christian M. Frey, manager of UTC's Solid Rocket and Materials Branch. It was built to support a two-year effort by UTC to apply the advantages of glass filament-wound casings—light weight, low cost and short lead-time—to the nation's giant booster programme. Glass-wound cases cost considerably less to build than steel cases, both because the materials involved are less expensive, and because a facility for making filament-wound cases costs consider ably less. A steel-casing plant equipped to produce such large cases would cost millions of dollars, and from the time ground was broken until the first case was ready would require two or three years. In contrast, UTC built its new facility and produced motor casings in less than a year. Mr Frey points out, "Because of the problems of special tooling and heat-treating facilities, it would take nine to 12 months to develope a large segmented steel rocket-motor casing after the order was given. And it would take from six to nine months to fill subsequent orders for the same casing. But our filament-winding process allows us to build a glass-fibre casing in half that time, and re-orders should take less than four months to produce." In UTC's view, glass-fibre cases weigh about 30 per cent less than steel cases. As a result, the division has been able to develop motors in which the usable propellant accounts for as much as 94 per cent of the total weight. The basic winding process is relatively simple. High-strength glass rovings, each containing some 250,000 fibres one-tenth the thickness of a human hair, pass through a resin bath and are wound on to a rotating mandrel. A shuttle guides the resin- impregnated fibre over the mandrel in high-strength patterns that are continued until the desired wall thickness has been built up. After it is wound, the casing is hardened and cured in an oven. NEW PHOTO SYSTEM FOR NIMBUS An experimental system for transmitting local cloud-cover pictures direct from meteorological satellites to inexpensive ground stations will probably be flight-tested using a Tiros satellite later this year. Known as the Automatic Picture Transmission (APT) subsystem, it was designed for use with the Nimbus weather- satellite system and is expected to have a significant effect on weather analysis and forecasting when it is perfected and introduced operationally as part of this system. The APT subsystem in Nimbus will enable meteorologists to obtain a few immediate local-area cloud-pattern photographs of high quality when the satellite is within 1,700 miles of a receiving station. This will normally occur twice a day at any receiving station in the world. The estimated ground-equipment cost is $30,000 per set. Transmission of pictures from the satellite will be by a technique similar in principle to the method now used to send radio news photographs. These pictures will be received and reproduced immediately on specially adapted facsimile machines. This is accomplished by transmitting a narrow-band television signal from the satellite to the ground-station aerial and receiver, which feeds it directly to the facsimile machine. The heart of the new system is a lin vidicon tube, designed specifically lor use in weather satellites. Photographs taken by the
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