Additive manufacturing for lightweighting satellite platform

Lightweight structures with an internal lattice infill and a closed shell have received a lot of attention in the last 20 years for satellites, due to their improved stiffness, buckling strength, multifunctional design, and energy absorption. The geometrical freedom typical of Additive Manufacturing allows lighter, stiffer, and more effective structures to be designed for aerospace applications. The Laser Powder Bed Fusion technology, in particular, enables the fabrication of metal parts with complex geometries, altering the way the mechanical components are designed and manufactured. This study proposed a method to re-design the original satellite structures consisting of walls and ribs with an enclosed lattice design. The proposed new structures must comply with restricted requirements in terms of mechanical properties, dimensional accuracy, and weight. The most challenging is the first frequency request which the original satellite design, based on traditional fabrication, does not satisfy. To overcome this problem a particular framework was developed for locally thickening the critical zones of the lattice. The use of the new design permitted complying with the dynamic behavior and to obtain a weight saving maintaining the mechanical properties. The Additive Manufacturing fabrication of this primary structure demonstrated the feasibility of this new technology to satisfy challenging requests in the aerospace field

New trends in 4D printing: A critical review

In a variety of industries, Additive Manufacturing has revolutionized the whole design-fabrication cycle. Traditional 3D printing is typically employed to produce static components, which are not able to fulfill the dynamic structures requirements and relevant applications such as soft grippers, self-assembly systems, and smart actuators. To address this limitation, an innovative technology has emerged and is called “4D printing”. It processes smart materials by using 3D printing for fabricating smart structures that can be reconfigured by applying different inputs such as heat, humidity, magnetic, electricity, light etc. At present, 4D printing is still a growing technology and it presents numerous challenges regarding materials, design, simulation, fabrication processes, applied strategies and reversibility. In this work a critical review about 4D printing technologies, materials and applications is discussed

Additive manufacturing for sustainable energy production in pico hydroelectric power plants

Additive manufacturing has proven to be a reliable method of producing components that are often difficult to produce using traditional methods. The growing worldwide energy demand requires the development of new innovative approaches to sustainably produce energy. This necessitates the development of small pico-hydroelectric power plants, which are more sustainable and practical for decentralized energy production. This study investigates the capacity of additive manufacturing to fabricate tiny, miniature hydroelectric power turbines using Selective Laser Melting. The study goes on to explore ways to make it more sustainable, such as modifying process parameters to achieve a minimum surface roughness and using a parametric design approach. The results of the methods used were validated by measuring the surface roughness and dimensional accuracy using profilometry and reverse engineering techniques. The findings showed that the methods used in this study could be used to obtain a customizable solution for manufacturing pico-turbines sustainably without the need for additional postprocessing