I wonder how practical it might be to integrate turbo machinery into an automated design system like this?
Oh, and it really is beautiful with copper construction and that fascinating swirl.
This is addressed in the article:
> This is a relatively compact engine, which would be suitable for a final kick stage of an orbital rocket.
It has lots of real world application, just not currently as part of a lift stage since you're right it's a pressure based one as opposed to a pumped engine.
It shouldn't have to compete - yet. Your question doesn't get at the more interesting one, which is, "will it eventually?"
> No CAD was used in the design
This is amusing -- while I understand they mean "CAD tools" like 3d modeling software, the entire engine was literally "computer-aided design", no?
That being said, I think stuff like this is governed by homeostasis: bleeding-edge technological advancements eventually get turned into regular features. In this case: I'm sure we'll continue to see CAD software to build more complex structures with less human intervention; and maybe eventually designers will expect their CAD software to generate whatever rocket engine their product requires.
Are there consumer-grade 3D printers that can print copper?
Or print a hobby-sized version of a rocket (out of some heat-resistant material)?
(I'm thinking about the model rockets you may have had as a kid with an A8-3 engine.)
That said, 3D printing an easily-removable mold for coring, such as from wax, would be amazing.
From the article:
- First rocket engine built entirely through a computational model without human intervention
- Likely the shortest time from spec to manufacturing for a new rocket engine (2 weeks, usually this process takes many months in manual engineering using CAD)
- First liquid fueled rocket engine developed in the United Arab Emirates
- Engine worked on the first attempt
- No CAD was used in the design
Does anyone in the field of rocketry specifically know if this alleviates some previously annoying constraint?
My uninformed gut suspects that these rocket spend an overwhelming amount of time in the post-design stage (I mean rocket engines seem to stick around for a long, long time, right?). But I’m a programmer I don’t know anything about this stuff.
"We've built a great new way to design physical structures."
"So what? The existing ways work just fine."
"We designed and built a rocket engine in two days."
However, even in the rocket field, there's a "design, simulate, build, test" cycle. They can do two of those steps in effectively 0 time and with significantly lower cost.
Moreover, it looks like the design has incremental feedback from something akin to simulate.
Hmmm. My software compiles itself 'without human intervention' when I click the compile button (ignoring the thousands of hours of work I put into writing the code and the even larger amount of work that went into creating the compiler).
- Your code specifies design constraints--you need it to do X and Y and Z.
- The engine designers needed the engine to fit in X and operate at Y temperature and not blow up (Z).
- This program optimizes the engine design for the physics instruction set.
Computer: generates natural language output in response to arbitrary prompts
Programmer: it’s just a computer program, it doesn’t require intelligence to do that. It’s not doing rocket science.
Computer: does literal rocket science
Programmer: sure, but it’s still just running a computer program
Obviously the Raptors are much, much larger than the 3D printed engine from the article.
Interested to see what happens between Lab71, Hyperganic and nTopology - traditional CAD/CAM packages are integrating topology optimisation / generative design but are simply not voxel-first. Perhaps there's a middle-ground to be found (though possibly requires more developed use cases first).
Hyperganic, Lab71 or nTopology?
Do you have a link?
Interestingly the author of it is Lin Kayser, former CEO of Hyperganic.
If your blowtorch produces 5kN, all the power to you. Even small rocket engines are surprisingly strong.
Lin (co-founder of LEAP 71 — and "I was there, when we heard the rocket rumble through 3m of concrete bunker walls")
Still amazingly cool, but to the other questions on this thread I'm sure the performance is not comparable to an existing rocket engine design.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_impulse#Specific_impu...
But outside the etymologies, there is no standard, agreed upon definition for either the term engine nor motor. I personally like these etymology-based definitions (otherwise how do you excuse the term "siege engine") but it's not a hill I'd die on.
- The linked article is about improving the speed of manufacturing with 3D printing. The linked article claimed that there was no need for any post-fabrication qualification and there was much skepticism in that claim. But they did perform a sub-orbital launch.
- This article is about improving speed in the design cycle. The article mentions after printing it was "post-processed at the University of Sheffield and prepared for the test". Here there is skepticism of the actual performance (namely efficiency) of the engine for practical purposes.
3D printing rocket engines themselves in and of itself is not a new thing. Rocket Labs has 3D printed rocket engines and has been flying them since 2018
I guess nothing to see here.