A Colorado company has been awarded a contract to qualify its copper additive manufacturing process for hypersonic flight. America Makes, an Ohio firm, will give Ursa Major $4 million for the project.

With this follow-on contract, the company will use its qualified AM copper process to produce thrust chambers for its Hadley and Draper aircraft engines.

John Wilczynski, CEO of America Makes, said the company partnered with Ursa Major to demonstrate the impact that additive manufacturing can have in solving supply chain and manufacturing challenges in our defense industrial base.

Ursa Major will change its copper additive manufacturing capacity

“Ursa Major continues to be at the forefront of the implementation of additive manufacturing in aerospace and defense programs,” Wilczynski added.

Using the $4 million in the contract, Ursa Major plans to transition copper additive manufacturing capacity in flight-qualified hardware for its America Makes customers: the National Center for Defense Manufacturing and Processing (NCDMM) and the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, according to a report.

In the next two years, the company will install a Velo3D Sapphire XC Laser Beam Powder Bed Fusion Additive Manufacturing (PBF-LB) car to qualify its copper additive manufacturing process on a large-scale production platform. Once qualified, the company will manufacture thrust chambers to support both the Hadley and Draper flight engines. AM metal.

High quality and scalable systems

Ursa Major COO Nick Doucette said America Makes has been a trusted partner for the past three years, enabling Ursa Major to create high-quality, scalable systems in the company’s Advanced Manufacturing Laboratory in Youngstown, Ohio.

Doucette highlighted that the next step would establish Ursa Major as a scalable and reliable manufacturing partner in the defense and aerospace sector while maturing production readiness for the company’s Draper and Hadley rocket engines.

Doucette also argued that Ursa Major’s nine-year track record of safety and compliance is truly remarkable when experts consider the evolving technologies, unique materials and demanding manufacturing processes that are required for this industry and the innovation that Ursa Major brings it to market.

After the collaboration between the two companies began in 2021, Ursa Major developed an additive manufacturing process capability for the high conductivity and high strength copper-chromium-niobium alloy of NASA GrCop-42 and produced prototype traction chambers for the variant vacuum of the Hadley liquid rocket engine. , according to AM metal.

Now, the scope of the collaboration has shifted from prototyping to the production and qualification of engine hardware.

Additive manufacturing is currently experiencing a rapid rate of technological change through advancements in AI software and tools, according to reports. The industry also has a relatively low level of consolidation.

While these hallmarks can be beneficial for innovation, they can lead to challenges in moving parts from research and development (R&D) to mass production, especially in safety-critical applications where fixed and locked-in processes are the norm, according to America does.