The sample chamber with sample holders. Photo courtesy of Airbus

As a leading international manufacturer of advanced ceramics, the CeramTec Group has once again successfully produced a batch of ceramic sample containers for a space experiment facility on the International Space Station (ISS).

In the course of this and previous joint product development, CeramTec, together with Airbus Defence & Space and other partners in a project consortium, developed sample containers for experiments as complex components and manufactured them at the Plochingen site.

The pot sample holders and cage sample holders are made of silicon nitride and were installed in the ISS for the first time in 2017. They are used in the Electro Magnetic Levitator (EML), a multi-purpose research facility for natural science experiments on board the space craft.

The EML and its predecessors can already look back on more than four decades of successful research work by international teams from Germany, the USA, Italy, Russia and other nations. In the EML, the sample containers are inserted into a coil in which metal alloy samples are fixed all around in a contact-free manner by electromagnetic fields while suspended in zero gravity.

For analysis, the samples are melted, cooled in the liquid state and then solidified again. These precision measurements of certain thermophysical properties of metals, alloys and semiconductors, which are not possible on Earth, make it possible to analyse the early phases of the formation of material structures and to expand our understanding of transition processes, atomic structures and material properties.

The objective here is to improve production and casting processes on Earth thanks to the material properties measured in space, in order to achieve an increase in quality while reducing the cost of high-tech castings.

The ceramic material silicon nitride (Si3N4) is particularly suitable for this purpose due to its non-existent electrical conductivity, which prevents external influences on the measurements, and the required high-heat resistance. The measurement cycles take place in temperature ranges between 500 and 2100°C.

This, as well as the absolute reliability and consistently high product quality, have once again convinced the project consortium to use CeramTec advanced ceramics for what is probably “the most demanding application in the universe”.

The sample containers were launched into space aboard the SpX-22 Commercial Resupply Services mission to the ISS in June.