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UCSD Students Test Fire 3D-Printed Metal Rocket Engine
schwit1 writes "Like something out of a Robert Heinlein novel, students at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) have built a metal rocket engine using a technique previously confined to NASA. Earlier this month, the UCSD chapter of the Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (SEDS) at the Jacobs School of Engineering conducted a hot fire test for a 3D-printed metal rocket engine at the Friends of Amateur Rocketry launch site in California's Mojave Desert. This is the first such test of a printed liquid-fueled, metal rocket engine by any university in the world and the first designed and printed outside of NASA."
News summaries are allowed to contain spoilers, you know.
(RTFA, and it did work.)
An ugly bag of mostly water.
There was a young lady from Venus, whose body looked like a...
Ezekiel 23:20
Your fate will be quick, but quite heinous:
A spacecraft will land on...
"and the first designed and printed outside of NASA"
How do you know? I am thinking a lot of countries out there are not so open about the goings on in their research labs. Same goes for the US military. My guess is that if NASA is already on the public record for X, quite a few organisations in the world have done Y, where Y > X.
3d metal printing - the possibilities for robotics projects excite me, although the dawning of skynet also fills me with dread.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
From the article:
I was wondering about this when I saw this in the article " In addition, printed alloys have greater tensile strength than castings."
Sintered is stronger than cast when both are heat treated, etc.?
A bullet may have your name on it, but artillery is addressed to " Whom It May concern"
A human, read The Marching Morons by Cyril M. Kornbluth.
Star Trek, there maybe hope.
No kidding. Everyone knows that 3D printing is for making gunz. . They have absolutely no other purposes. [/sarcasm]
Castings, sure. But rocket engines are usually welded. It's not really a usefull comparison.
Huh? It DOES. It has a regenerative cooling jacket, just like most every liquid-fueled rocket engine or your exhaust nozzle would melt rapidly.
Mod parent -1 Misinformed.
AC is right.
"and the first designed and printed outside of NASA" is wrong. See, for example, reports on http://rocketmoonlighting.blogspot.com/ where the author designed and later tested on the static fire stand a 3D-printed engine. No NASA connection.
It's not an only example either. If you have follower Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge, you might remember Unreasonable Rocket team, which some considered as third best. In 2010 fall the blog http://unreasonablerocket.blogspot.com/2010_09_01_archive.html describes their experiments with 3D-printed engines.
Yes, this article states: "The rocket has a regenerative cooling jacket that extends to the nozzle to keep the engine cool while firing."
No, the modern milling is nowhere as convenient as 3D-printing for making this kind of engine. You can't mill channels from one piece, and welding - or soldering, as Russians used to do - greatly adds complexity to the process.
Yes, 3D-printed detail is not usually as strong as a milled one. However the difference in strength could be relatively small (see, e.g., http://www.morristech.com/Docs/CoCrDataSheet.pdf). For rocket engines the thrust-to-weight ratio is important, but still allowing for some compromises parameter.
The main advantage of using 3D-printers for rocket engines is simplicity of the process and rapid turnaround with designs. Both are important in order to get things right reasonably fast. For non-NASA, it could also mean money savings - since the main chamber with nozzle and collectors can be a single piece, single price item, and the remaining parts are relatively inexpensive.
3D-printing has some relationships to powder metallurgy, which was under development as a promising technology some decades ago. Today with 3D-printers you can have, for example, an engine made of steel infused with bronze - having good both mechanical and thermal properties.
Paul Breed was 3D printing liquid fuel rocket motors in 2010 and was test firing them by 2011. His test firings also took place at FAR, the same facility mentioned in this article.
Here is a link to Paul's blogs that (somewhat) relate to his experiments with printed engines:
Unreasonable Rocket
I believe that he beat NASA and everyone else out of the gate with this technique.
And as you tread the halls of sanity, You feel so glad to be, Unable to go beyond. I have a message, From another time..
When I saw the header, I thought that the rocket engine would have 3D-printed cooling ducts around its nozzle. It is something that Apollo / space shuttle - sized rocket engines have, but which can be quite complex. This engine doesn't.
The article clearly states: "The rocket has a regenerative cooling jacket that extends to the nozzle."
The jackets/piping are clearly visible in all the photos, too...
Please help metamoderate.
It only counts if they used "Raspberry Pi" to control the firing.
(no hipsters were hurt in the production of this post)
Now we need 3D printed metal mini-rockets that can shoot down these rockets, to put on commercial planes to stop the inevitable in 10 years.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
A friend of mine from Monash University told me he attended a demonstration of a 3D printer that used stainless steel as a medium.
This goes a little bit beyond sintered epoxy-bronze powders in terms of strength.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Printing a metal part can include blind voids that are difficult or impossible to do with a milling machine. And see my post above regarding 3D printing with stainless steel media.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear