Aerojet Rocketdyne bets for the Additive Manufacturing

Aerojet Rocketdyne has invested time and resources over the last two decades to evolve Additive Manufacturing technology to meet the stringent requirements of rocket engine and defense systems applications.

In recent years, Aerojet Rocketdyne has notched several successes in developing this technology for a broad range of products, from discrete component demonstrations to hot-fire testing of engines and propulsion systems made entirely with Additive Manufacturing.

Aerojet Rocketdyne has also been working to differentiate its Defense Advanced Programs (aka Rocket Shop) using the new design spaces enabled by Additive Manufacturing. Rocket Shop examples include tactical (hypersonics), missile defense and strategic systems applications.

Benefits

Cost: The use of Additive Manufacturing dramatically reduces the amount of touch labor required to build many engine components, which allows them to deliver more affordable legacy products and new product applications to their customers. 

Schedule: Components that once took hundreds of hours to produce with traditional manufacturing techniques can now be built in just days using a single machine. This reduces lead times significantly and allows them to bring their products to market more quickly.

Flexibility: Aerojet Rocketdyne’s engineering team has refined its approach to the design process to reflect the dramatically expanded possibilities enabled by Additive Manufacturing. They are free to design products that were once thought impossible due to the constraints of traditional manufacturing.

What Sets Them Apart

Powders: They fully understand powder feedstock that is utilized – including particle size, distribution and chemistry – to make sure the resulting alloys can perform under the extreme pressures and operating conditions of rocket engines.

Process: They have worked directly with OEMs to learn the intricate details about how the selective laser melting process works so they can adjust parameters -- such as laser speed, and core and contour scan strategies -- to achieve optimal microstructures and surface finish features to meet their requirements.

Properties: They have performed detailed analysis of components built using Additive Manufacturing to fully characterize the materials and properties to make sure they will perform as designed. They actually test the alloys at the extreme operating conditions faced by their products, including temperatures that range from -320°F to 2,100°F (-195ºC to 1.148ºC). They account for all those operating environments in their designs to ensure they can operate in the extreme environments of space.