Bimo Tech has been awarded a contract from the European Space Agency under the FLPP FIRST! programme to develop refractory high-entropy alloys for oxygen-rich preburners in next-generation rocket engines. ArianeGroup joins as the industrial end-user partner.
The engineering problem
Oxygen-rich staged combustion engines run preburner gas above 3,000°C at pressures exceeding 300 bar. The gas is simultaneously hot, oxidising, and corrosive. Current nickel superalloys — Monel K500, Inconel 600 — survive these conditions, but they limit how far engine designers can push chamber pressures and cycle efficiency. Reusability makes it worse: cyclic thermal loads demand ductility that most refractory metals lack at room temperature.
No single-element refractory metal meets all four requirements (melting point, oxidation resistance, ductility, and printability). High-entropy alloys composed of W, Mo, Ta, Nb, and Cr open a combinatorial design space where these trade-offs can be engineered rather than tolerated.
What SPARK does
The project follows a three-stage pipeline:
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Computational screening — CALPHAD phase stability predictions and DFT formation energy calculations narrow the composition space from roughly 10⁶ candidate alloys to fewer than 100 that are thermodynamically stable and printable.
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Additive manufacturing trials — Laser Powder Bed Fusion (LPBF) builds test coupons, calibrating scan speed, layer thickness, and preheat temperature to control defect populations in the printed alloys.
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Hot-gas validation — Printed coupons are tested at ArianeGroup's ERBURIGK facility under representative oxygen-rich preburner conditions. Performance is benchmarked against Monel K500.
Consortium
Bimo Tech leads the project as prime contractor, handling alloy design, computational screening, and LPBF synthesis. ArianeGroup provides end-user requirements and hot-gas testing infrastructure.
SPARK's alloy targets feed directly into P.R.I.S.M., where they define the fitness function for the autonomous AI-driven discovery pipeline.