Ablative materials represent a traditional approach to thermal protection adopted to protect re-entry space vehicles from the severe heating encountered during hypersonic flight through planet or Earth atmosphere. In this paper low density carbon-phenolic ablative materials were modified with addition of ZrO₂ nanoparticles with the aim of improving the mechanical properties and the ablation resistance. It is known that an uneven distribution of nano-reinforcement could be responsible for a drastic limitation of potential beneficial effects. For this reason, several surface modification treatments were performed on nanoparticles to limit their agglomeration. The developed ablative materials, modified with different concentrations of nano-ZrO₂ particles, were fully characterized for microstructure and mechanical properties (of both virgin and charred materials) and finally tested in an oxyacetylene torch-based facility to compare their thermal performance. Experimental evidence showed that the addition of nano-ZrO₂ produces an improvement of both thermal and mechanical performance with respect to base material.

烧蚀材料代表了一种传统的热保护方法，可用于保护重返太空飞船免受在行星或地球大气层进行超音速飞行期间遇到的严重热量。在本文中，通过添加ZrO ₂纳米粒子对低密度碳酚烧蚀材料进行了改性，目的是提高机械性能和抗烧蚀性。众所周知，纳米增强材料的不均匀分布可能是对潜在有益效果的严重限制。由于这个原因，对纳米颗粒进行了几种表面改性处理，以限制它们的团聚。开发的烧蚀材料，经不同浓度的纳米ZrO ₂改性完全表征了这些颗粒的微观结构和机械性能（包括原始材料和烧焦的材料），最后在基于氧乙炔炬的设备中进行了测试，以比较它们的热性能。实验证据表明，相对于基础材料，纳米ZrO ₂的添加可提高热性能和机械性能。