Dual-Use Ceramic Technology Spinoff Applications

NASA has developed software that enables American industry to establish the reliability and life of ceramic structures in a wide variety of 21 st Century applications. Designing ceramic components to survive at higher temperatures than the capability of most metals and in severe loading environments involves the disciplines of statistics and fracture mechanics. Successful application of advanced ceramics depends on proper characterization of material properties and the use of a probabilistic brittle material design methodology. The NASA program, known as CARES (Ceramics Analysis and Reliability Evaluation of Structures), is a comprehensive generalpurpose design tool that predicts the probability of failure of a ceramic component as a function of its time in service. The latest version of this software, CARES/LIFE, is coupled to several commercially available finite element analysis programs (ANSYS, MSC/NASTRAN, ABAQUS, COSMOS/M, MARC), resulting in an advanced integrated design tool which is adapted to the computing environment of the user. The NASA-developed CARES software has been successfully used by industrial, government, and academic organizations to design and optimize ceramic components for many demanding applications. Industrial sectors impacted by this program include aerospace, automotive, electronic, medical, and energy applications. Dual-use applications include the design of automotive engine components, graphite and ceramic high temperature valves, TV picture tubes, ceramic bearings, electronic chips, glass building panels, infrared windows, radiant heater tubes, heat exchangers, and artificial hips, knee caps, and teeth.