Indian Startup 3D Prints Rocket Engine in Just 72 Hours (ieee.org) 53
cusco writes: Indian space startup Agnikul used a 3-D printer from German company EOS to print an engine out of inconel, a high-performance nickel-chromium alloy, in one solid piece over the course of roughly 72 hours. While other companies like Relativity Space and Rocket Lab are using 3-D printers extensively, Agnikul's engine is unique in being printed in one go, rather than as multiple components that need to be stitched together. This approach significantly speeds up manufacturing time.
The single-engine technology demonstration rocket produced 6 kilonewtons of thrust and reached an altitude of 6.5 kilometers before splashing down into the ocean. The launch vehicle used was about 6 meters tall with a single engine, making it roughly equivalent to the second stage of the company's planned commercial product, Agnibaan. Agnibaan will be a two-stage rocket, 18 meters tall, featuring eight engines in total, and capable of carrying a 300-kilogram payload to an altitude of around 700 km. The company believes that their 3D printing approach opens the door to providing low-cost, "on-demand" launch services to operators of small satellites.
IEEE Spectrum adds: Assembling the rest of the rocket and integrating the engine took roughly two weeks. The company says that opens the door to providing low-cost, "on-demand" launch services to operators of small satellites, which otherwise need to wait for a ride share on a bigger rocket. The big challenge now will be going from a single engine to a cluster of seven on Agnibaan's first stage, says cofounder and CEO Srinath Ravichandran. This raises all kinds of challenges, from balancing thrust across the engines at lift-off to managing engine plume interactions when the engines gimbal to alter the trajectory. "But these are problems that people have figured out," he says. "We believe that we should just be able to fine-tune it for our mission and go." The company is currently building facilities to carry out ground tests of engine clusters, says Ravichandran, and is targeting its first orbital launch for this time next year.
The single-engine technology demonstration rocket produced 6 kilonewtons of thrust and reached an altitude of 6.5 kilometers before splashing down into the ocean. The launch vehicle used was about 6 meters tall with a single engine, making it roughly equivalent to the second stage of the company's planned commercial product, Agnibaan. Agnibaan will be a two-stage rocket, 18 meters tall, featuring eight engines in total, and capable of carrying a 300-kilogram payload to an altitude of around 700 km. The company believes that their 3D printing approach opens the door to providing low-cost, "on-demand" launch services to operators of small satellites.
IEEE Spectrum adds: Assembling the rest of the rocket and integrating the engine took roughly two weeks. The company says that opens the door to providing low-cost, "on-demand" launch services to operators of small satellites, which otherwise need to wait for a ride share on a bigger rocket. The big challenge now will be going from a single engine to a cluster of seven on Agnibaan's first stage, says cofounder and CEO Srinath Ravichandran. This raises all kinds of challenges, from balancing thrust across the engines at lift-off to managing engine plume interactions when the engines gimbal to alter the trajectory. "But these are problems that people have figured out," he says. "We believe that we should just be able to fine-tune it for our mission and go." The company is currently building facilities to carry out ground tests of engine clusters, says Ravichandran, and is targeting its first orbital launch for this time next year.
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I think it's a bit of passive resistance to their culture. Treat the Dalits like crap and they will just shit on your streets in defiance.
As a Long-time /. Reader... (Score:1)
I didn't read TFA, but it'd be useful to know whether they'd printed a liquid or solid-fuel motor - the former being considerably more complex and fraught, what with turbopumps, potential ablative cooling and the like.
If liquid, what parts of the motor did they print? Hard to see how they could do it all in one go of liquid (in that materials for bearings are quite different from both printable materials and from those for ablative cooling or ablation resistance).
Re:As a Long-time /. Reader... (Score:5, Informative)
It's a liquid fuel rocket engine, and they printed it all in one piece. They didn't print the turbopumps obviously, but the rocket body with its cooling tubes, injectors, and such. Rocket Lab and other companies are printing pieces and assembling them, this seems to be the only fully printed motor. The EOS printers are apparently quite flexible. TFA goes on to say:
Agnikul printed the engine out of inconel, a high-performance alloy of nickel and chromium that can withstand high temperatures and mechanical loads. The machine also automatically outputs a report that details any deviations during printing, removing the need for postfabrication qualification.
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Rocket motor, not rocket engine. I always forget that there is a specific terminology.
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If someone actually believes that... yikes.
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It can probably be automated andi ntegrated into the printer, with ultrasound or lasers.
But, yes, it still needs to be done (at least until we can do vacuum engineering).
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If someone actually believes that... yikes.
My gut reaction as well. Somebody saying that as a pat on the back, "It's so good we won't even have to check it," will be believed by some penny pinching dimwit down the line and quality control will disappear in a puff of dollar signs. And later? In this particular case? An actual explosion!
Sintering plus 3D printing plus ceramic sealants (Score:2)
Everything at the Kwik-E-Mart!! (Score:1)
Just run in for :
Beer
Rocket Engines
And Doughnuts with sprinkles...
[hmm....sprinkles....*drool*]
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So what. (Score:2)
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TFA says they put it all together in two weeks, 72 hours is for the rocket motor alone. Considering that other companies take a month or several just to assemble and weld the motor it's quite amazing. The EOS printer puts out a detailed report of any irregularities in the printing process, inspection is negligible.
Don't discount the Indian space industry, remember that they put a satellite in orbit around Mars for less than the cost of the wedding for one of their industrialist's daughters and in the proc
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I've been to an Indian wedding; this is damning with faint praise.
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for less than the cost of the wedding for one of their industrialist's daughters and in the process became the first ever to accomplish it on their first try.
Yeah. We knew Katharina was going to be a tough one to marry off.
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Hard to say in this case, but this is far from a unique capability and I know that there are rocket engine companies in the USA that can turn around thruster design changes, all the way to testing it, in a week or so - in some cases, less. Most of the parts are not changing from unit to unit, the area for experimentation (and where 3d printing might help) are usually just the injector and combustion chambers. I wouldn't discount it out of hand, there are certainly American companies that can do this, why n
6 KN (Score:2)
I had no idea how much 6 kilonewtons is - a quick web search has a 1.8L automobile ICE putitng out 7 KN.
So we can probably use these for our salt flat rocket cars. :)
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6 kn is about 8 horses. Do you think even a pharaoh of Egypt ever had more than 8 horses pulling his carriage? I'll bet the most was 4.
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You've got to remember that a horsepower wad defined using a very sick horse. It's original purpose was to sell steam engines.
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Those bastards tricked me to switch from a horse that was working fine as long as I fed him good hay to a noisy damn train.
Re: very sick horse (Score:2)
Was that an African or European horse?
Re:6 KN (Score:5, Interesting)
And Boiler Horsepower is not equal to the Horsepower for an engine, Boiler HP being more than 13 times as large, as it was originally defined to approximately reflect the capacity of a boiler required to get 1 HP out of an inefficient steam engine of the time.
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In 1976 for the Bicentennial Parade the Schlitz Beer Company sponsored the 'Schlitz 40 Horse Hitch'. It was quite impressive, 40 big beautiful Clydsdales all controlled by one guy. IIRC he had 20 reins in his hands, one pair for each two pairs of the team, and they went around the corner near us almost perfectly. Don't remember anything else about that parade though, I was full of antihistamines because of some nasty hay fever.
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Seems like they do that periodically? .. found this on YouTube apparently filmed in 1989: This? https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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But less dangerous than a tuk-tuk.
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No re-usability (Score:2)
Sorry, but if it's not reusable it's doomed. There will be no market for one-time use rockets by 2030.
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nonsense, for small payloads the market will be huge.
Re: No re-usability (Score:2)
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Wrong.
Small rockets and satellites to around 400 km will quickly come down anyway, self clearing and there is no problem.
Small operators don't need to waste the budget on a "reusable" fad.
And even "reusable" things like the Falcon 9 leave a 2nd stage up there too, either decays quickly for low altitude missions or takes months to come down. Don't believe the marketing hype about "reusable", some components aren't
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What exactly do you think is going to happen in the next 5.5 years that one-use rockets won't ever be used again?
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Well, a bunch of companies from the US and China will have reusable small, medium, and heavy lift launch capability. If you purchase a new Hyundai for every ride, that's going to be more expensive than renting a Bentley for every ride.
Reusable small lift: https://www.rocketlabusa.com/l... [rocketlabusa.com]
On medium lift fully reusable, there are at least 5 or 6 companies working on it.
Furthermore, even the heavy launch reusable rockets will have frequent enough cadence that small satellites can hitch a ride and use cheap kic
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What's the cost of a new Honda Civic vs a Ferrari that needs a new V8 after every drive?
One use rockets are very simple by comparison, extremely well understood, require no post launch work to recover/repair/retesr/etc, and pretty much just work.
Until I moved across country, I had a beater car because it wasn't always cost effective or sensible to drive my nice new fancy car.
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Back in 2022, the cost to SpaceX for booster refurbishment was $1 million (reference: https://www.ark-invest.com/new... [ark-invest.com] ).
Starship is expected to be rapidly reusable.
Other companies like Rocket Lab and others working on reusable rockets (notably China's Landspace and iSpace) will be able to replicate or best that as they are using methane which tests (repeat firings of rocket engine) have shown require less or no refurbishment due to lack of soot formation that can clog injectors and screw things up.
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I found full cost to launch values for Falcon 9 vs rockets.
https://science.howstuffworks.... [howstuffworks.com].
https://www.syfy.com/syfy-wire... [syfy.com].
Tl;dr: Falcon is cheaper per pound for pure payload. If you want a crew module then Falcon is about 2.5more expensive per pound. So SpaceX is doing really well but is not the cheapest option for all loads. At the same time technology improvements are expected to reduce cost, they actually raised cost already due to inflation. No one can be certain of what the future may hold.
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Some rockets explode intentionally (Score:2)
Sorry, but if it's not reusable it's doomed. There will be no market for one-time use rockets by 2030.
Nonsense, there will be rockets that are intended to explode at their destination.
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Cryo-fueled? That doesn't seem very smart.
excellent (Score:1)
oppressed people will soon be able to print anti-aircraft and intermediate range missiles to protect themselves
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Well, print the "motor"s, not the rocket engines. I.e. not the ancillary mechanisms needed to make it work.
OTOH, they would probably be better served by printing solid fueled rockets. But the guidance systems would still be beyond state-of-the-art for 3-D printing.
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Guidance systems are trivial now, as long as the GPS network is still intact. A cheap throwaway cell phone is perfectly adequate for all the computing necessary, in fact the phone's USB plug has more computing power than the navigation computer on the Apollo 11 LEM (really). I believe the rockets that Ansar Allah is using in Yemen are guided by something only slightly bigger than a Raspberry Pi.
And yeah, I did put 'engine' in the headline instead of 'motor', oops. I always mix up the terminology.
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Guidance systems are trivial now, as long as the GPS network is still intact.
GPS is intentionally designed to be inaccurate on command, for just this reason.
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Don't need GPS, just good old 1950s machining for gyro system for AA or intermediate range missiles, we're not talking about 12,000 km ICBM or interplanetary probe
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actually, the turbopumps can be 3D printed too, done deal
Guidance systems? Good old 50+ year old machining, not the problem, we're not talking ICBM or moon shot here.
KSP Plugin .. (Score:2)