A Combustion Chamber Liner Is NASA's First 3D-Printed Full-Scale Rocket Engine Part

Back in November, 2014 NASA manufactured the #-Link-Snipped-# in order to save transport costs and time. NASA further wants to make use of additive manufacturing technology for continuing its journey to Mars and assist explorers living on the Red Planet. It even desires to develop rocket engine parts about 10 times faster and also minimize the cost by more than 50 percent. Not only that, the ultimate goal of the space agency is to make the building engine parts with advanced designs a repeatable process. For achieving this long-term objective, NASA engineers has built the first full-scale, copper rocket engine part- a combustion chamber liner that works at both extreme temperatures (both hot and cold) and pressures by availing 3D printing techniques.

Combustion-Chamber-liner
The 3-D printed combustion chamber liner​

According to Chris Singer, director of the Engineering Directorate at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, temperatures rise to above 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit on the inner side of the fine copper liner wall. And, the engineers need to prevent the part's melting by recirculating gases with temperature less than 100 degrees above absolute zero continuously on the other side of the liner. The most difficult part in building this copper liner was to make tiny 200+ passages that have complex internal geometries. These channels are built between the inner and outer liner wall for circulating the gas.

Raw-Copper-Powder
An electron microscope image of raw copper powder used for building copper liner​

The materials scientists at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio created a copper alloy called ‘GRCo-84’ for building combustion chamber liner. Copper is a good conductor of heat and owing to this property it is used for lining an engine combustion chamber and for other parts. However, melting the copper powder during additive manufacturing process is not at all an easy task. Furthermore, the selective laser melting machine in Marshall’s Materials and Processing Laboratory took 10 days and 18 hours for blending 8,255 layers of copper powder in order to make the chamber.

The Marshall engineers will shift the part to NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia for putting a nickel super-alloy structural jacket on the outer side of the copper liner. Later, it will be tested under simulated extreme temperatures and pressures during a rocket flight at Marshall.

Source: NASA 3-D Prints First Full-Scale Copper Rocket Engine Part | NASA

Replies

  • Ankita Katdare
    Ankita Katdare
    This is amazing. Speechless. The advances conducive to space technology & research only strengthen the human race's forces for further exploration.
    I recently read about NASA assembling one separate dedicated unit for finding Alien life. This means even some of the top brains haven't ruled out the possibility of living beings other than the ones on the Earth.
    I think we live in a very exciting era, where we have both the tools and the will for exploration of space & beyond.
    By lowering costs of building tools necessary for spaceships, we are only working towards making them go further ahead.

    Would love to read your thoughts on this fellow CEans.

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