Simulating and Comparing Sintering Infill Patterns for Lunar Regolith
Open Access
- Author:
- Cooper, Jordan
- Area of Honors:
- Mechanical Engineering
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Science
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- Brian Allen Maicke, Thesis Supervisor
Rick Ciocci, Thesis Honors Advisor - Keywords:
- additive manufacturing
regolith
sintering
sinter
3d printing
lunar
moon - Abstract:
- Sintering is the process of utilizing a laser to fuse molecules together from a powdered form, much like additive manufacturing with metals. Using the sintering process, it may be feasible to start building structures, tools, or any other necessary materials on the Moon. During the Apollo missions of the 1960’s and 1970’s, lunar soil (regolith) samples were returned to Earth to study, identifying its composition in the process. This experiment’s purpose is to simulate different infill patterns utilized in additive manufacturing to determine if they are viable for use with regolith. The primary metrics identified for this simulation include minimum safety factor, total deformation, and stress to area ratio, each of which are used to rank the cross-section models against the control models. Identifying cross-sections that provide good strength for their area are potentially useful for reducing material used for similar strength properties, cutting manufacturing time, material cost, and material transport. The results of this experiment indicate that the simulation is missing the additive manufacturing design and structural analysis component for modeling and simulating materials composed of particles instead of a continuous body such as parts manufactured with a sintering process. The strength of the models is highly dependent on the amount of surface area, with larger areas giving better results. Future work will be dependent on better simulation methods and computational abilities or to test with practical specimens in a laboratory setting. With either future work option, more cross-sections and iterations can be tested to improve understanding about how sintered parts function mechanically and how to better simulate sintered parts.