According to media reports, the 2024 Shanghai Science and Technology Awards were announced in Shanghai on the 26th. Among them, the "New Generation Launch Vehicle Surface Special Protective Coating Technology and Application" project completed by the team of Professor Zhu Xinyuan of Shanghai Jiao Tong University won the special prize of the Science and Technology Progress Award.
This project has achieved an important breakthrough in the field of aerospace protective coatings. For the first time in the world, the team proposed and realized a new technical route of "hyperbranched polymer coating integrated protection", which replaced the traditional heat insulation sheet splicing process and provided key technical support for the development of my country's new generation launch vehicle.
Space exploration missions place extremely high demands on rocket surface protection materials. Satellite fairings and low-temperature fuel tanks are core components in the protection system. They face the double test of extreme high temperatures and ultra-low temperatures respectively: the fairings need to withstand the impact of high-temperature airflow exceeding 500°C during the atmospheric passage stage, while the low-temperature tanks have to cope with liquid oxygen environments as low as -183°C.
Faced with this severe challenge of "ice and fire", Professor Zhu Xinyuan's team abandoned the traditional "collage" protection idea and innovatively proposed an integrated coating solution. This technology completely eliminates hidden dangers of seams through one-time spraying. It not only significantly improves reliability, but also significantly shortens the production cycle.
During the actual research and development process, the team must solve the three major problems of "strong adhesion, resistance to extreme temperatures, and easy construction" of the coating. High-performance requirements mean adding large amounts of functional fillers to coatings, but when fillers exceed a certain proportion, the coating becomes too viscous and difficult to apply.
After continuous research, the team successfully integrated hyperbranched polymers with inorganic functional fillers. In order to cooperate with the development progress of the new generation rocket, the team also introduced artificial intelligence technology to build a data model through computational simulation and quickly deduce the required hyperbranched polymer structure, which greatly improved the research and development efficiency.
At present, the results of this project have been successfully applied to multiple models of launch vehicles in my country, and have achieved more than 20 engineering applications, showing important practical value and broad prospects.
