Molecular Characterization of Polyimide Film and Silicone Adhesive Outgassing Using Mass Spectrometry

The prediction of contaminant levels is paramount to controlling and reducing their impact on space missions. In recent years, it has become clear that a real breakthrough could only be achieved through a change of paradigm, namely, by going beyond the classical characterization of total contaminant mass and instead characterizing the various emitted chemical species individually: both quantitatively and chemically. This paper first reviews the methodology proposed to achieve this objective and then its implementation on two examples of materials (Black Kapton® and NuSil CV4-2946) on the basis of existing ASTM-E-1559 outgassing data (Garrett, J. W., Glassford, P. M., and Steakley, J. M., “ASTM-E-1559 Method for Measuring Material Outgassing/Deposition Kinetics,” Journal of the IEST, Vol. 38, No. 1, 1995, pp. 19–28) including mass spectrometry (MS) data. We show that the thermogravimetric analysis performed on the contaminant deposits (heating at 1 K/min) allows a good enough time separation of chemical species to analyze and often identify them through their mass spectra. In turn, the knowledge of the fragments constituting their spectra allows an improved analysis of the MS data collected during the initial outgassing phase. The outgassing time profiles of each of these chemical species then tells a lot about their actual outgassing physical laws. On the two studied materials, outgassing physics were found to be consistent with Fickian or non-Fickian diffusion rather than with residence time desorption. After confirming these findings with more specific and more sensitive experiments, the door will be open to greatly improve assessments of the contaminant amounts and nature in flight through realistic multispecies physical models.