RAMPT team wins NASA award, reflects on Additive Manufacturing successes
Under the scope of the Rapid Analysis and Manufacturing Propulsion Technology (RAMPT) project, NASA works to produce new alloys and additively manufactured parts. The overarching goal of RAMPT has been to support the commercial and technical readiness of Additive Manufacturing for partners as well as the industry at large.
On July 31 the RAMPT team was awarded NASA’s 2024 Invention of The Year award for its excellence and contributions to NASA and the commercial industry’s deep space exploration goals.
“Across NASA’s storied legacy of vehicle and hardware design, testing, and integration, our underlying strength is in our application of extremely durable and severe environment materials and innovative manufacturing for component design,” said Paul Gradl, RAMPT co-principal investigator at NASA Marshall.
“We strive to fully understand the microstructure and properties of every material and how they will ultimately be used in components before we make them available to industry for flight applications.”
The history of RAMPT
Since its inception, RAMPT has conducted 500 test-firings (totalling over 16,000 seconds) of additively manufactured injectors, nozzles, and chamber hardware, using newly developed extreme-environment alloys, large-scale AM processes, and advanced composite technology. The project has also started developing a full-scale version of the workhorse RS-25 engine, which experts say could reduce its costs by up to 70% and cut manufacturing time in half.
As additively manufactured structures get larger and more complex, the development of large-scale AM has become increasingly important. Today, Additive Manufacturing researchers like those at NASA are helping the industry produce lighter, more robust, intricately designed rocket engine components 3.05 m tall and 2.44 m in diameter.
“NASA, through public-private partnerships, is making these breakthroughs accessible to the commercial space industry to help them rapidly advance new flight technologies of their own,” Gradl said. “We’re solving technical challenges, creating new supply chains for parts and materials, and increasing the industry’s capacity to rapidly deliver reliable hardware that draws a busy commercial space infrastructure ever closer.”
In addition to developing the end technology, RAMPT intends to use simulation tools to identify the viability of new alloys and composites at a microstructural level. In doing so, the material properties under critical circumstances (the heat and stress of liftoffs, the cold of space, long transit times, etc.) can be assessed.
Industry-wide applications of NASA’s research
NASA’s strategy to encourage commercial and academic buy-in is to offer public-private partnerships, wherein outside organisations contribute as much as 25% of project development costs and benefit from the results. One example of this was the refinement of its GRCop42, created at NASA Glenn nearly forty years ago, which allowed Relativity Space to launch the first additively manufactured rocket in March 2023.
“Our primary goal with these higher-performance alloys is to prove them in a rocket engine test-fire environment and then hand them off to enable commercial providers to build hardware, fly launch vehicles, and foster a thriving space infrastructure with real scientific, social, and economic rewards,” Gradl said.
A key benefit of Additive Manufacturing hardware development is radically reducing the ‘design-fail-fix’ cycle wherein engineers develop new hardware, ground-test it to failure to determine the hardware’s design limits under all possible conditions, and then tweak accordingly. That capability is increasingly important with the creation of new alloys and designs, new processing techniques, etc.
The RAMPT project did just that, successfully advancing new Additive Manufacturing alloys and processes, integrating them with carbon-fibre composites to reduce weight by up to 40%, developing and validating new simulation tools, and making all this data available to industry through public-private partnerships.
“We’re able to deliver prototypes in weeks instead of years, conduct dozens of scaled ground tests in a period that would feasibly permit just one or two such tests of conventionally manufactured hardware, and most importantly, deliver technology solutions that are safer, lighter, and less costly than traditional components,” Gradl said.
John Fikes, RAMPT project manager, added, “Ten years from now, we may be building rocket engines – or rockets themselves – out of entirely new materials, employing all-new processing and fabrication techniques. NASA is central to all of that.”
The future of RAMPT
The RAMPT project continues to progress and receive recognition from NASA and industry partners. NASA’s Marshall Spaceflight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, leads RAMPT, with key support among engineers and technologists at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland; Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California; Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia; and Auburn University in Auburn, Alabama, plus contributions from other academic partners and industry contractors.
Interested in learning more about how NASA uses its design-fail-fix philosophy to progress the space industry? Check out ‘Separation anxiety: Lessons learned at NASA from a developmental rocket engine failure’ by Alison Park, Deputy Technical Fellow, Materials and Additive Manufacturing, and Paul Gradl, Principal Engineer, from the Spring 2023 issue of Metal AM magazine.
The full article is available here.
