Bimetallic 3D Printing Strategies for Liquid-Engine Rocket Combustion Chambers
Research Question:
How do multi-laser layouts in Selective Laser Sintering (SLS) 3D printing affect the structural integrity of liquid engine combustion chambers?
My Experiment
First, an STL mesh for a liquid-engine combustion chamber was located and downloaded. The combustion chamber used in this study was created by Thingiverse user tommy99osullivan, and is licensed under Creative Commons. Each simulation compared chambers with different contact tolerances. A liquid-engine combustion chamber was downloaded from creative commons and exported as an STL file for the simulations. The printer’s precision was defined as Contact Tolerance (mm mesh), and the chamber’s thermal durability was defined as the percentage of Heat Flux Convergence Rate. Autodesk Fusion 360 was used to assign custom materials, manipulate print precision, and run thermal simulations. All relevant data was compiled into quantitative analysis and was compared using R 2 values. The research question is:
How do multi-laser layouts in Selective Laser Sintering (SLS) 3D printing affect the structural integrity of liquid engine combustion chambers?
What I Found
This study investigated the impact of SLS 3D printer precision on thermal durability of a liquid-engine combustion chamber, finding that printing precision impacts the heat flux convergence rates with nearly 0.767% causal relationship.
Three main conclusions were drawn from the results of this study.
- First, the thermal gradients of combustion chambers rely solely on the contact distance between the outer face of the inner lining and the inner faces of the outer jacket.
- Second, the SLS precision in model fabrication, as well as printer meshing precision, each play a major role in the numeric thermal results, in Kelvins, throughout the chamber.
- Third, when comparing thermal results of this study’s bi-metallic SLS combustion chamber with 1 mm depth to RAMPT’s DED bi-metallic chamber with 1 mm depth, the stress and thermal gradients similarly radially cooled as gas exited the chamber.
- The correlation between thermal durability is strong enough to conclude that SLS technology could feasibly be optimized for use in fabricating durable and complex propulsion technology.