askywalker98
Well-Known Hunter
Hello everyone,
I know I haven't been very active on this forum for quite a while. School and life have taken over, but I try to poke in from time to time.
Right now, I'm working at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland on an engineering internship. Everything is very exciting, and I'm faces with new challenges and problems to overcome everyday.
Today has brought a challenge to my attention that reminded me of good 'ol TDH. We are working with carbon fiber tubes, and at a point in the assembly process, they need to be "baked" for two hours at 150 deg F. The problem is, the largest sample is going to be 10 feet long, so as I'm asking around the center, it looks like no one has an oven that large. The current plan is to have a metal tube slightly larger in diameter than the carbon fiber samples, wrap that metal tube in some sort of heating tape, and that will be our oven. I'm having trouble finding the right heating element to wrap around the tube. Commercial off the shelf products like heating tape for pipes in the winter only get to about 100 deg F, and the highly specialized equipment from suppliers is looking expensive.
I know a lot of people around here use ovens for vac forming, and some have built their own with heating elements. Could anyone point me in the right direction to some tutorials on building the oven, and what type of temperature control is offered?
I realize this is an odd request, so please, if this is either in the wrong section, or has no place here, feel free to move or remove this post.
Thank you everyone for all the great years of help,
-Anthony
If you would like to know more about the project I'm working on, have a look : SPIE Newsroom :: Experimental twin telescope enables new scientific studies
I know I haven't been very active on this forum for quite a while. School and life have taken over, but I try to poke in from time to time.
Right now, I'm working at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland on an engineering internship. Everything is very exciting, and I'm faces with new challenges and problems to overcome everyday.
Today has brought a challenge to my attention that reminded me of good 'ol TDH. We are working with carbon fiber tubes, and at a point in the assembly process, they need to be "baked" for two hours at 150 deg F. The problem is, the largest sample is going to be 10 feet long, so as I'm asking around the center, it looks like no one has an oven that large. The current plan is to have a metal tube slightly larger in diameter than the carbon fiber samples, wrap that metal tube in some sort of heating tape, and that will be our oven. I'm having trouble finding the right heating element to wrap around the tube. Commercial off the shelf products like heating tape for pipes in the winter only get to about 100 deg F, and the highly specialized equipment from suppliers is looking expensive.
I know a lot of people around here use ovens for vac forming, and some have built their own with heating elements. Could anyone point me in the right direction to some tutorials on building the oven, and what type of temperature control is offered?
I realize this is an odd request, so please, if this is either in the wrong section, or has no place here, feel free to move or remove this post.
Thank you everyone for all the great years of help,
-Anthony
If you would like to know more about the project I'm working on, have a look : SPIE Newsroom :: Experimental twin telescope enables new scientific studies