Materials innovations in 2025: Novel testing, lunar insights and 3D-printed composites
By Cat Hofacker
By Cat Hofacker
The Materials Technical Committee promotes interest, understanding and use of advanced materials in aerospace products where aerospace systems have a critical dependency on material weight, multifunctionality, and lifecycle performance.
Innovations in aerospace materials converged on a pivotal moment in 2025 from thinking differently about how we measure performance, where we prove performance and how we solve for manufacturing constraints in the work from the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology (New Mexico Tech), Aegis Aerospace and the University of Delaware.
In May, Ashok Ghosh and team at New Mexico Tech reached an aerospace materials testing milestone with the AQUASHIELD project. Today’s most transformative discoveries often require methods that deviate from conventional approaches out of necessity leading to revolutionary characterization methods, and the AQUASHIELD project exemplifies this principle. When the researchers attempted to characterize their breakthrough fluid-filled multifunctional composites (FFMC) using standard flexural tests, catastrophic failure occurred when the fluid bled from exposed edges during loading, making conventional ASTM C393 testing impossible.
This challenge forced a new innovative solution to overcome this false failure. In response, Ph.D. student Gabriel Maestas developed the biaxial clamped plate flexure test in 2023, which was a complete paradigm shift from linear beam testing to enclosed plate systems using additively manufactured enclosures laminated directly into composite structures.
The evolution from BCPFv1 achieving only 5 pounds per square inch (psi) fluid retention to BCPFv2’s 15 psi retention represents a 300% improvement that enabled reliable characterization. These advanced testing capabilities revealed FFMC achieving 25% superior acoustic transmission loss, 1,500-fold dynamic modulus increases during shock loading, enhanced specific stiffness under high strain rates, and 40% mass savings with 80% cost reduction for radiation shielding applications. NASA experts recognized this achievement and awarded New Mexico Tech an ESPCoR grant in May, recalling one reviewer who described the achievement as “extremely intriguing and so unique it’s hard to grasp all the potential applications.”
Jessica Piness and team at Aegis Aerospace reported the first dedicated lunar materials science payload delivery. Regolith Adherence Charaterization-1, or RAC-1, landed on the moon in March aboard Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost-1 lander. This mission was part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program. Funded by NASA, the RAC-1 payload hosted 15 different materials that were exposed to the lunar surface environment to better understand how they interacted with regolith dust. These materials were selected by NASA, industry and academia from common spaceflight materials including TiAl6V4, Kapton polyimide, Kevlar and various thermal control coatings.
Lunar regolith dust is a highly abrasive material and can cause erosion and electrostatic issues. Therefore, it is critical to understand how regolith dust impacts materials during landing and under constant use on the lunar surface. RAC-1 contained samples exposed to the environment that were photographed periodically to assess the buildup of regolith. From these images, Aegis Aerospace and principal investigators clearly distinguished the impact of regolith from landing and further dust accumulation during lander operations. This approach marked a significant step away from Earth-based testing and simulation to direct and real-time environmental exposure validation of regolith dust interaction.
In August, Laura Wilson, Brandon Hearley, Evan Pineda of NASA Glenn Research Center and Robert Wheeler of Micro Testing Solutions completed a novel compression experiment of a microscale T700/LM-PAEK thermoplastic composite. This experiment, based on seminal work conducted at the Air Force Research Laboratory under the direction of Mark Flores, was intended to observe the evolution of damage mechanisms in-situ during testing and at the fundamental scale at which they occur. The 22 micron x 37 micron gage section of the composite was fabricated using a focused ion beam scanning electron microscope (FIB-SEM), and then the composite sample was loaded into a custom test frame — designed and built by Micro Testing Solutions to meet the microscale testing requirements. The compression testing was conducted inside a SEM so images of the deformation and damage of the sample could be collected along with the strain and displacement data from the test frame.
Contributors: Ashok K. Ghosh, Evan J Pineda, and Jessica Piness
Opener image: The shadow of the Blue Ghost lander on the lunar surface. Credit: Firefly Aerospace
