Space has always stimulated excited explorers, scientists and engineers, and since the Second Post-War period space exploration has been a key technological sector, also inspiring movies that strongly impressed the cultural life of our society, such as the famous Kubrick's movie 2001, A Space Odyssey.
Since that time, and since to humans touched the Moon, space explorations and space missions have gained a more and more important role in our society. Initially, the design of space systems able to work safe and reliably has been characterized by a huge innovation rate in terms of materials, emerging technologies and scientific knowledge of the human behavior in an extreme environment. Today, due to the ever-increasing importance of communications in everyday life, the space sector is also increasingly impacting our everyday life, economy, safety and security and can be considered a pillar for maintaining a prior position in the worldwide competition. Due the increased importance of the space sector, the present space sector framework presents many more actors with respect of the past, both governmental, private companies and public-private partnerships, making competition in space more and more severe. This means that for remaining competitive new disruptive solutions are needed for deep-space missions, satellite installations and for the construction of space infrastructures. The introduction of new materials, able to improve the behavior and the strength of the present ones in the extreme conditions related to space is a key factor to this aim, especially as regards the propulsion systems: the development of next generation space exploration systems requires high temperature materials able to guarantee low density, high strength and ductility, oxidation resistance, good creep properties: High Entropy Alloys (HEA) are an excellent candidate for possible replacement for superalloys.
However, HEAs are relatively new class of materials and, in order to exploit these advancements on HEA, further research and development is needed.
The goal of ATLAS is to take over the present limitations and unsolved issues that limit the utilization of HEA through multidisciplinary materials design framework that advances the state-of-the-art of High Entropy Alloys and related materials compounds towards the emerging practical needs of the space propulsion industry.
To achieve this ambitious result the following challenges have bene addressed, starting from the definition of an accurate material property database and design of the HEA.
To produce the HEA materials and related compounds materials designed within the project, two conceptually different additive manufacturing processes (Selective Laser Melting (SLM) and Cold Spray (CS)) have been used from the production of coupons and samples to the final full scale demonstration.
