Getting confidence for flying additive manufactured hardware

Abstract

In the next coming years, the European space industry must assume the challenge of implementing in an efficient way additive manufacturing (AM) technology due to the continuous need for reducing costs and improving performances. Together with the advantage of producing very complex and optimized geometries, AM can reduce drastically part weight and lead time of unique products (Tomlin and Meyer in Topology optimization of an additive layer manufactured (ALM) Aerospace part. In: The 7th Altair CAE Technology Conference, pp 1–9, 2011; Emmelmann et al. in Phys Procedia 12A:364–368, 2011). Similar to what happened during the implementation of composite materials within the aeronautics and space sectors at the early 80s, efforts must be directed to the development of fabrication and design rules, together with appropriate means of verification (Lasagni et al. in On the investigation of processing parameters and NDT inspection on additive manufacturing materials for future launchers, workshop on additive manufacturing for space applications. ESA-ESTEC, Noordwijk, The Netherlands, 2014). This work reports on the development, optimization, and AM fabrication of flight hardware for launchers, under the European Space Agency Future Launcher Preparation Programme. Articles for the clamp band separation system from Ariane 5 has been analysed together with other secondary structural items. The paper presents the full complete story, starting with the optimization of processing parameters for selective laser melting in different alloys, up to the qualification test of the whole system. A feasibility analysis for non-destructive evaluation is presented as well.