Test firing of a 3D-printed rocket engine designed through Computational Model

I shortened the title a bit from "LEAP 71 hot-fires 3D-printed liquid-fuel rocket engine designed through Noyron Computational Model."

From the article:

- First rocket engine built entirely through a computational model without human intervention

- Likely the shortest time from spec to manufacturing for a new rocket engine (2 weeks, usually this process takes many months in manual engineering using CAD)

- First liquid fueled rocket engine developed in the United Arab Emirates

- Engine worked on the first attempt

- No CAD was used in the design

Cool!

> No CAD was used in the design

This is amusing -- while I understand they mean "CAD tools" like 3d modeling software, the entire engine was literally "computer-aided design", no?

I was going to say that this is nothing Hyperganic hasn't done....and then looked up Lin and Joesefine who were previously at....Hyperganic. I wonder what the story is over there. Open sourcing their geometry kernel is a very confident move.

Interested to see what happens between Lab71, Hyperganic and nTopology - traditional CAD/CAM packages are integrating topology optimisation / generative design but are simply not voxel-first. Perhaps there's a middle-ground to be found (though possibly requires more developed use cases first).

>The engine was designed autonomously without human intervention

Hmmm. My software compiles itself 'without human intervention' when I click the compile button (ignoring the thousands of hours of work I put into writing the code and the even larger amount of work that went into creating the compiler).

This appears to be a pressure-fed rather than pumped engine, so limited real-world utility. Nonetheless, it’s incredibly impressive especially given that it seems to have been successful on the first try.

I wonder how practical it might be to integrate turbo machinery into an automated design system like this?

Oh, and it really is beautiful with copper construction and that fascinating swirl.

It's really cool, but the flame profile is that of a blowtorch, not a rocket engine

That thing looks absolutely alien, or maybe, like something evolved organically. Which I suppose it has.

An incredible achievement and in to my eyes a thing of beauty. This is not the first time I've seen computational geometry (played with it myself) but this output seems something else.

Is "engine" appropriate to use here? It seems to just be the combustion chamber, similar to the article last week about the rocket test in India. It's cool research, but I don't know that the engine process matters much when you compare this to what SpaceX is doing with their engines and reducing the complexity of the moving parts, not just the static ones.

Where are the performance spec sheets?

I imagine the factories of the future will be 3d printed and look like metallic fungus. They will be serviceable only with robots that can slide around in narrow gaps to inspect them. They will mostly be operated in the dark. Perhaps they will be operated deep underground.

Quite interesting to contrast with the comments on the HN about the Indian startup Agnikul doing the same thing.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40668088

This sounds interesting "Noyron — a foundational Large Computational Engineering Model". What kind of architecture this model have?

> 3D-printed in copper

Are there consumer-grade 3D printers that can print copper?

Or print a hobby-sized version of a rocket (out of some heat-resistant material)?

(I'm thinking about the model rockets you may have had as a kid with an A8-3 engine.)

Awesome demonstration of an exciting development technique. It's still proof of concept level at 5kN thrust. For comparison, the current Falcon 9 engine (Merlin 1D Vacuum+) has 981 kN thrust.

Bonus points for "steely-eyed rocket-woman" although it looks like rocket engines are "just" an example/test-case, which makes it even more impressive.

Remind me when we got an AI designed, 3d printable Dyson sphere.