Abstract
Many polymers, paints and organic-based materials exposed to space environment undergo dramatic changes and irreversible degradation of physical and functional characteristics. A number of protective schemes are used to reduce the effects of space environment among which protective coatings, mechanical metal foil wrapping or cladding, specially synthesized bulk materials can be mentioned. However, protection of such materials in space still remains a major challenge, especially for future long duration exploration missions or permanent space stations. In addition to the traditional approaches, surface modification processes are used increasingly to protect or to impair new properties to polymers, paints and other organic-based materials.
A brief overview of surface modification processes developed at ITL for space materials is presented in this paper. The developed processes helped to change the surface properties of treated materials thus protecting them from the hazards of low Earth orbit (LEO) and Geostationary orbit (GEO) environments or impairing new functional properties to space materials used in LEO/GEO.
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Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank his co-workers, Dr. Z. Iskanderova and Dr. Y. Gudimenko for their devotion to the topic and many years of hard work at ITL that they put into the conceiving and development of these processes. Special thanks are due to Prof. R.C. Tennyson who envisaged the importance of the surface modification approach and was mostly instrumental in the first steps undertaken at UTIAS in this field. Finely my thanks are due to all my colleagues who participated in the work during the past years that lead to the development and applications of the surface modification technologies at ITL.
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Kleiman, J.I. (2017). Polymer Surface Modification for Space Applications. In: Kleiman, J. (eds) Protection of Materials and Structures from the Space Environment. Astrophysics and Space Science Proceedings, vol 47. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19309-0_20
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19309-0_20
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