The aerospace industry is constantly leading changes in technology, with manufacturers producing commercial and military aircraft, spacecraft, rockets, and missiles.
As a result, the aerospace industry highlights the unique potential of additive manufacturing as its primary challenges align very closely with the capabilities the novel technology brings to the table. In tandem with sophisticated software, additive manufacturing can help manufacturers overcome many hurdles to growth and accelerate their pace of innovation.
Here are a few important challenges in aerospace that additive manufacturing can solve, and applications successfully manufactured with AM technology.
Part complexity
Many aerospace parts are intricate or complex. Mostly they must fit within very restricted physical environments, weigh as little as possible, and meet high performance standards.
Additive gives aerospace designers the freedom to design parts that would be impossible to reproduce in any other context. These designs often take advantage of intricate lattice or other implicit-described internal structures that dramatically reduce the mass of a part.
To design and print such complex parts, manufacturers need software with advanced design for additive manufacturing (DfAM) tools. The 3D printing software should allow users to generate complex designs quickly and easily, adapt and check if the designs are manufacturable, simulate functional performance, as well as performing a streamline simulation of the mechanical and thermal behavior of the part during the build.
With these capabilities, a manufacturer can leverage additive technology without wasting material, machine time and money on failed prints.
Cost of manufacture
An application that is directly related to design complexity is part consolidation. Many of the systems and assemblies used in aerospace vehicles are made up of dozens or even hundreds of parts, each of which must be designed, tested, manufactured, and assembled. All of this contributes to the final costs.
Additive manufacturing allows engineers to consolidate parts into a single design. Part consolidation is the process of redesigning an assembly to merge as many parts as possible without compromising its overall strength, functionality, or performance. The advantages are a smaller, less complex supply chains, faster production and significant cost savings.
Lightweighting
The most popular application of additive manufacturing in aerospace is lightweighting, a technique for minimizing weight of a part by applying topology optimization, lattice structures or other implicit or explicit design methods.
Several software solutions in today’s market can be used for this purpose. The challenge, however, is integrating this step into the entire workflow efficiently, avoiding bottlenecks in data transfer.
The key is using software that offers a toolkit for the entire additive manufacturing process, not just the design. With a single solution covering everything from lightweighting, through build prep, manufacture and inspection, manufacturers avoid wasting time on software switching.
Quality control
A major hurdle to quality is lack of predictability of the printing process. Metal additive manufacturing invariably involves some amount of part deformation as heat is applied to materials.
Software can make the process more precise. Build simulation analysis and compensation tools help predict print quality, prevent design or production anomalies, and compensate your design or support structures to achieve required tolerances.
Once the build begins, a build monitoring software can monitor, control and deliver AI/ML based alerts related to the print process in real-time. Overall, this helps detect potential defects and take corrective action before they occur.
Standards and specifications
Another quality-related challenge in additive is achieving consistent quality across all printers and production sites. This is essential to ensuring that every part meets regulatory standards.
Because additive manufacturing is a fully digital process, it’s possible to track all the information about production in a single framework, and use that data to create reports and provide full traceability of the production process.
Reports cover anything from stress and plasticity simulation, printability checks, and anomaly detection of every part, while traceability implies recording all the technologies and parameters used for the build, locations, printer IoT and in-situ data.
Innovative examples of additively manufactured aerospace parts
The full potential of additive manufacturing in aerospace can best be understood by looking at some actual examples.
Oqton
Rocket thruster demonstrator
A rocket thruster demonstrator with integrated internal cooling channels was 3D printed with a copper alloy called GRCop-42. The demonstrator uses a regenerative cooling strategy that flows rocket fuel through cooling channels to remove heat from the thruster’s walls before it is returned to the chamber for combustion. GRCop-42 was developed by NASA and exhibits characteristics that make it ideal for high-temperature applications like rocket propulsion. Producing the part with laser PBF allowed the part to be manufactured in a relatively short amount of time with the required density and mechanical properties.
In-space propulsion solutions provider Agile Space Industries additively manufactures rocket engines and thrusters for space exploration companies like Astrobotic and ispace. Additive manufacturing helps the company drastically reduce the mass of parts as well as quickly iterate on new designs. Most important is the ability to innovate quickly, going from design to hot-fire testing within weeks — a process that traditionally takes years.
An example of cutting-edge use of additive manufacturing is a fuel-cooled oil cooler (FCOC) heat exchanger with gyroids that Oqton developed together with the University of Dayton Research Institute. The picture shows a 3D visualization of the heat exchanger as well as a cross-section of its internal structure. In this design, a U-shaped flow path replaces the straight tubes featured in the original version of the mechanism. The space of the flow path was filled with a double gyroid that forms the channels through which the oil and fuel flow separately.
Gyroids are lattice-like shapes that exhibit very high surface-to-volume ratios for efficient heat transfer. FCOCs cool aircraft engine oil, which can break down and damage the engine if it gets too hot, while preheating fuel to help it burn more efficiently. Gyroids, however, can’t be manufactured with traditional methods due to their curvature and interlacing lattice structure. AM is ideal for these structures.
Oqton
3D visualization of heat exchanger with gyroids
The future of manufacturing in aerospace is additive
These real-world examples are a sign that additive manufacturing is well on its way to establishing itself as a foundational technology for manufacturing in the aerospace industry. Not only does AM make it possible to create innovative, lightweight parts and assemblies that improve fuel efficiency, but it allows these parts to be made more quickly and conveniently.
Learn more about the potential of additive manufacturing in the white paper Additive Manufacturing in Aerospace.
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