Improved Alloy for Fabrication of Combustion Chambers by VPS

An alloy of 88Cu/8Cr/4Nb (numbers indicate atomic percentages) has been proposed for use in fabricating rocket-engine combustion chambers by vacuum plasma spraying (VPS). Relative to other techniques that could be used to fabricate rocket-engine combustion chambers, VPS is inexpensive. In VPS, a powder feedstock of the desired alloy becomes melted and deposited at high speed onto a substrate. Heretofore, those rocket-engine combustion chambers that have been fabricated by VPS have typically been made of the copper-based alloy NARloy-Z.