The Minimalistic Advanced Soft Hatch, MASH, Airlock was manufactured from heavy-biased Vectran fabric and medium plain-weave Vectran fabric. The biased fabrics came from 62-inch wide rolls and the plain-weave fabric came from 46-inch wide rolls. The completed airlock is 196 inches long. In order to manufacture this airlock, five different seam types were used. The heavily-biased material was strong in the warp direction and approximately 81% weaker in the fill direction. Since the heavily-biased material had significantly more fibers in the warp direction than in the fill direction, this led to windowing occurring during the manufacturing and handling process. This situation needed to be rectified, because the windowing could lead to holes in the restraint layer where the bladder could poke through. While some bladders are designed to carry structural loads, this bladder was not. This project investigated the following seams: lapped, repeat-lapped, fell, diamond, zigzag, three-line, and four-line. Three categories of seam fillers were compared to quantify their effects on seam efficiency. The processes used to increase seam efficiency of highly-loaded seams and novel seam testing methods are described in this paper.
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