The Board has concluded that the physical cause of the breakup of Columbia upon re-entry was the result of damage to the Orbiters Thermal Protection System, which occurred when a large piece of BX-250 foam insulation fell from the left (-Y) bipod assembly 81.7 seconds after launch and struck the leading edge of the left wing.As the External Tank is covered with insulating foam, it seemed to me essential that we understand the mechanisms that could cause foam to shed.

Many if not most of the systems in the three components of the Shuttle stack (Orbiter, External Tank, and Solid Rocket Boosters) are by themselves complex, and often operate near the limits of their per- formance.Attempts to understand their complex behavior and failure modes are hampered by their strong interactions with other systems in the stack, through their shared environment. The foam of the Thermal Protection System is no exception. To understand the behavior of systems under such circumstances, one must first understand their behavior in relatively simple limits. Using this understanding as a guide, one is much more likely to determine the mechanisms of complex behavior, such as the shedding of foam from the -Ybipod ramp, than simply creating simulations of the complex behavior itself.

I approached this problem by trying to imagine the fracture mechanism by which fluid pressure built up inside the foam could propagate to the surface. Determining this process is clearly key to understanding foam ejection through the heating of cryogenic fluids trapped in voids beneath the surface of the foam, either through "cryopumping" or "cryoingestion." I started by imagining a fluid under hydrostatic pressure in contact with the surface of such foam. It seemed clear that as the pressure increased, it would cause the weakest cell wall to burst, filling the adjacent cell with the fluid, and exerting the same hydrostatic pressure on all the walls of that cell. What happened next was unclear. It was possible that the next cell wall to burst would not be one of the walls of the newly filled cell, but some other cell that had been on the surface that was initially subjected to the fluid pres- sure.This seemed like a rather complex process, and I questioned my ability to include all the physics correctly if I tried to model it. Instead, I chose to perform an experiment that seemed straightforward, but which had a result I could not have foreseen.

I glued a 1.25-inch-thick piece of BX-250 foam to a 0.25-inch-thick brass plate. The 3-by-3-inch plate had a 0.25-inch-diameter hole in its center, into which a brass tube was soldered. The tube was filled with a liquid dye, and the air pressure above the dye could be slowly raised, using a battery-operated tire pump to which a pressure regulator was attached until the fluid was forced through the foam to its outer surface. Not knowing what to expect, the first time I tried this experiment with my graduate student, Jim Baumgardner, we did so out on the loading dock of the Stanford Physics Department. If this process were to mimic the cryoejection of foam, we expected a violent explosion when the pressure burst through the surface. To keep from being showered with dye, we put the assembly in a closed cardboard box, and donned white lab coats.

Instead of a loud explosion, we heard nothing.We found, though, that the pressure above the liquid began dropping once the gas pressure reached about 45 pounds per square inch. Releasing the pressure and opening the box, we found a thin crack, about a half-inch long, at the upper surface of the foam. Curious about the path the pressure had taken to reach the surface, I cut the foam off the brass plate, and made two vertical cuts through the foam in line with the crack.When I bent the foam in line with the crack, it separated into two sections along the crack. The dye served as a tracer for where the fluid had traveled in its path through the foam.This path was along a flat plane, and was the shape of a teardrop that intersected perpendicular to the upper surface of the foam. Since the pressure could only exert force in the two directions perpendicular to this fault plane, it could not possibly result in the ejection of foam, because that would require a force perpendicular to the surface of the foam. I repeated this experiment with several pieces of foam and always found the same behavior.

I was curious why the path of the pressure fault was planar, and why it had propagated upward, nearly perpendicular to the outer surface of the foam. For this sample, and most of the samples that NASA had given me, the direction of growth of the foam was vertical, as evidenced by horizontal "knit lines" that result from successive ap- plications of the sprayed foam. The knit lines are perpendicular to the growth direction. I then guessed that the growth of the pressure fault was influenced by the foams direction of growth. To test this hypothesis, I found a piece of foam for which the growth direction was vertical near the top surface of the foam, but was at an approximately 45-degree angle to the vertical near the bottom. If my hypothesis were correct, the direction of growth of the pressure fault would follow the direction of growth of the foam, and hence would always intersect the knit lines at 90 degrees. Indeed, this was the case.

The reason the pressure fault is planar has to do with the fact that such a geometry can amplify the fluid pressure, creating a much greater stress on the cell walls near the outer edges of the teardrop, for a given hydrostatic pressure, than would exist for a spherical pressure-filled void. A pressure fault follows the direction of foam growth because more cell walls have their surfaces along this direction than along any other. The stiffness of the foam is highest when you apply a force parallel to the cell walls. If you squeeze a cube of foam in various directions, you find that the foam is stiffest along its growth direction. By advancing along the stiff direction, the crack is oriented so that the fluid pressure can more easily force the (nearly) planar walls of the crack apart.

Because the pressure fault intersects perpendicular to the upper sur- face, hydrostatic pressure will generally not lead to foam shedding. There are, however, cases where pressure can lead to foam shedding, but this will only occur when the fluid pressure exists over an area whose dimensions are large compared to the thickness of the foam above it, and roughly parallel to the outer surface.This would require a large structural defect within the foam, such as the delamination of the foam from its substrate or the separation of the foam at a knit line. Such large defects are quite different from the small voids that occur when gravity causes uncured foam to "roll over" and trap a small bubble of air.

Experiments like this help us understand how foam shedding does (and doesnt) occur, because they elucidate the properties of "perfect" foam, free from voids and other defects. Thus, this behavior represents the true behavior of the foam, free from defects that may or may not have been present. In addition, these experiments are fast and cheap, since they can be carried out on relatively small pieces of foam in simple environments. Finally, we can understand why the observed behavior occurs from our understanding of the basic physi- cal properties of the foam itself. By contrast, if you wish to mimic left bipod foam loss, keep in mind that such loss could have been detected only 7 times in 72 instances. Thus, not observing foam loss in a particular experiment will not insure that it would never happen under the same conditions at a later time. NASA is now undertaking both kinds of experiments, but it is the simple studies that so far have most contributed to our understanding of foam failure modes.

Douglas Osheroff, Board Member