Fully reusable launch systems promise to be a big part of the space enterprise, but they bring their own technical challenges. This Aerospace team has taken on one of those problems — predicting hardware fatigue and failure — and taken home a prestigious award from the AIAA.

Hailing from Aerospace's Structural Mechanics Subdivision, Kevin Qu, Leland Shimizu, Jacob Rome, and Vinay Goyal presented their paper at AIAA SciTech in January. You can read the full thing, Digital Twins of Additive Manufacturing Parts for Fatigue Life Prediction, right here.

The problem they confront is this: additive manufacturing, an invaluable technique for producing countless parts for rockets and vehicles, can introduce microscopic flaws to the structure of those parts that, if not detected in time, can cause those parts to fail. This is not to say parts printed this way are themselves unreliable, but that the specific timing and nature of failure is difficult to predict.

A part meant to be used a dozen times in a dozen launches can hardly be taken out, cut to pieces for testing, and put back together again. So the team developed a way to represent those parts as digital twins that combine data from nondestructive testing, fracture mechanics, and uncertainty quantification.

"Fatigue has always been one of the big hurdles with additive manufacturing. Our digital twin approach gives designers a clear, real-time picture of a part’s strength," said Qu.

This means that designers can evaluate the chance that a part will meet fatigue life requirements right from the start, explained Shimizu, engineering specialist in the Structures Department: "Manufacturers can quickly decide if a defect needs fixing during printing, which saves both time and money."

This innovative approach won them the Collier Aerospace HyperX AIAA Structures Best Paper Award.

The team's initial results are promising, but work is ongoing. Continued investments in research and development, more in-situ nondestructive testing data from printer OEMs, and an integrated open-source framework are essential next steps.

“Our approach can streamline the entire process—from design through to finished hardware—making additive manufacturing much more agile and efficient,” said Goyal, principal director of the Structural Mechanics Subdivision and an AIAA Fellow.

This award represents a clear step toward more agile and reliable space hardware production, transforming the way we think about space-rated parts, and ultimately resulting in more reliable, cost-effective launches.