Additive manufacturing technology has never been so important

Sep 1, 2014 07:33 GMT  ·  By

Many of the 3D printing news we report on have to do with the regular consumer market, and how FDM and SLA technologies are becoming more accessible, price-wise. The greatest achievements still come from the industrial sector though.

Case in point, NASA has just made an announcement that could have huge implications for space travel: 3D printing is being used to make rocket engine injectors.

In fact, the organization only recently tested the injectors, or one of them. NASA has two of them 3D printed, it seems. Solid Concepts, from Valencia, California, built one, while Directed Manufacturing from Austin, Texas, made the second.

Both of them survived the 5-second hot-fire test run at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Although survived is not the best term to use. They basically breezed through the test, holding up better than expected.

Even one would have been a great accomplishment. It's no small matter to survive 6,000 °F / 3,315 °C (degrees Fahrenheit versus degrees Celsius). Especially when you're also producing 20,000 pounds / 9,000 kilos of thrust.

Normally, to make the injector, NASA has to call on special assembly lines that make 163 different individual components. Then mechanics have to assemble the injector.

3D printing technology cut the number of parts to two, which not only increases endurance (there are fewer segments to be forced apart or eroded) but also decreases the price of manufacturing and time of production. All the while, the injector maintains its 40 individual spray nozzles.

In-house manufacturing capability will also allow NASA to look at test data and modify parts faster. All in all, the 3D printing technology not only improves on the quality of spacecraft components, but also reduces the time it takes to invent new things, or refine old ones.

Even if it weren't possible to improve the components, the time savings would have been worth it all on their own. After all, not many things allow for a production process that lasts weeks or months to be reduced to mere hours. Yet this is precisely what 3D printing technology has enabled.

You can see the flames produced by the injectors in the photo up on the right, or the video embedded below. In the meantime, we'll be looking around for other scientific breakthroughs or consumer goods that 3D printing may have helped bring about over the weekend. There's always something new to report. Why, just Saturday we found a printer that could 3D print things from 4 extruders at once.