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NASA and Aerojet Rocketdyne Partner to Test AM Hardware

NASA has announced that its Robotic Deposition Technology (RDT) team is partnering with Aerojet Rocketdyne, an American rocket and missile propulsion manufacturer headquartered in Sacramento, to advance its 3D printing, and more specifically metal additive manufacturing, technolo

NASA and Aerojet Rocketdyne Partner to Test AM Hardware
3Dnatives

NASA has announced that its Robotic Deposition Technology (RDT) team is partnering with Aerojet Rocketdyne, an American rocket and missile propulsion manufacturer headquartered in Sacramento, to advance its 3D printing, and more specifically metal additive manufacturing, technologies. NASA also hopes that this partnership will aid in the advancement of its capabilities for liquid rocket engines in landers and on-orbit stages/spacecraft. With Aerojet Rocketdyne, NASA’s RDT team has manufactured rocket engine hardware which has successfully passed both cold spray and hot fire tests.

Led out of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, the team has been designing and manufacturing innovative and lightweight combustion chambers, nozzles, and injectors that will incorporate automated robotic deposition 3D printing technologies. These include cold spray deposition, laser wire direct closeout, laser powder bed fusion, and laser powder directed energy deposition. With this work NASA intends to evolve these processes using weight-optimized materials to validate operability, performance, and reusability through hot fire testing.

NASA Aerojet Rocketdyne

3D-printed bimetallic lightweight thrust chamber assembly before hot fire testing at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. (Photo Credits: NASA)

Last year, the RDT team tested hardware such as injectors and carbon composite nozzles and hot fire testing its 3D printed lightweight combustion chamber and nozzle under the Long Life Additive Manufacturing Assembly, or LLAMA, project. Together with Aerojet Rocketdyne, NASA has now finished testing hardware under a second lamoid-named project – the Advanced Lander Propulsion Additive Cold-spray Assembly, or ALPACA, project. According to Thomas W. Teasley, an engineer at the Marshall Space Flight Center “Testing of the RDT Advanced Lander Propulsion Additive Cold-spray Assembly (ALPACA) chamber went very well and demonstrated a new technology capability for NASA and industry partners”.