Paper Title
Mechanical and Abrasive Consideration of Additives Effects on the Carbon Fabric/Phenolic Composites

Abstract
Carbon/phenolic composites are used in the nozzle parts of solid rocket motors due to their heat-resisting, ablation, and high strength characteristics, which are required to endure the high temperature and pressure of combustion gas passing through the nozzle. One of the most important factors on erosion rate is the void content of the ablative composites. Facilities should be designed to simplify the exhaust of volatile components, in order to reducing the void content in the manufactured samples. Accordingly, to reduce the void percentage of carbon/phenolic composites in this study, samples are manufactured by the vacuum bag molding technique, and they are cured in autoclave. In order to comparison of the effect of manufacturing process on the ablation characteristic of carbon/phenolic composites, another batch of samples has been produced by the acid curing method. According to ASTM E 285-80, they are exposed to a plasma torch flame. The results show that the void percentage of samples which are manufactured by the autoclave process is 60% lower than the acid-cured samples, and this leads to reduce the linear erosion rate of these composites. Keywords- carbon/phenolic composites, ablation, autoclave, acid curing, plasma torch