‘Inspecting 3D printed parts was a massive challenge for us in the early years’ – Ursa Major CEO Joe Laurienti

Inspecting 3D printed parts was often more costly than the part was to make, according to Ursa Major Technologies CEO Joe Laurienti.

Laurienti discussed the challenges Ursa Major Technologies has previously faced with the inspection of 3D printed parts on this week’s Additive Insight podcast, produced by TCT Magazine.

The company is leveraging additive manufacturing in the design, development and manufacture of its advanced propulsion systems, which are being produced to support critical missions across commercial and government sectors. In doing so, the company is not only iterating designs in a quicker fashion but also tackling more complex geometries, which raised the question: ‘How challenging has it been to inspect these increasingly more complex parts?’

The answer is that it was tough. As explained on the Additive Insight podcast, Ursa Major decided from the beginning it was going to lean on additive manufacturing because of its capacity to enable complex geometries and the ability to develop alloys specific to the 3D printing processes it was using. And though the company is now seasoned enough to have a ‘glutton of data’ that helps to inform its quality assessment practices, the inspection processes haven’t always been as slick as they are today.

“In the early days of the business, you can imagine that was a massive challenge because we didn't have a quality lab, we didn't have quality engineers,” Laurienti explained. “Sending a part out for CT or X-ray was probably more costly than the part itself. So, in the early days, inspection was just a massive headache. We had to take the risk of combining systems level testing, so building an engine and blowing it up or building an engine and collecting data, with inspecting those piece parts.”

Today, Ursa Major gathers a suite of data from the printing process, the inspection process and the testing of subcomponents – to inspect the resistance of internal channels and features, for example. Depending on the part, CT scanning or X-ray scanning will be used to assure the quality of the component, while each and every print will have tensile samples somewhere on the build plate.

Developments over the weekend proved just how helpful this gathering of data has been as Ursa Major’s Hadley engine flew for the first time as Stratolaunch successfully tested its TA-1 test vehicle.

“So, you start to just pull all of this data together and then you combine it with the thousands of parts that we've printed and assembled into engines and fired as an assembled engine, and you get this suite of data from a laser turning on on a 3D printer to a rocket engine firing or flying. And, at this point, it's been really nice to anchor our manufacturing and quality through the entire process of data collection.

“Much like any manufacturing process, you can start to batch quality inspect, but it depends on how well known the process is. I can’t call one casting out of ten good if it’s the first ten castings I’ve bought, but if it’s castings #1000 through #1010, you can probably call one out of ten good as long as you understand the process.”