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Weight is everything. Every gram counts on launch day. But, what about reducing weight on launch day by additive manufacturing what you need on the Moon with its resources, such as lunar regolith? The lunar regolith is made up of rock chips, mineral fragments, impact and volcanic glasses, and agglutinates found on the Moon.

MIT PhD student Alexander O’Brien is working to deliver the next generation of fusion devices through research on additive manufacturing of metal-ceramic composites. “After years of knowing I wanted to work in green energy, but not knowing what that looked like, I very quickly fell in love with nuclear engineering.”  

A nanoscale lattice prepared using a new technique developed by the lab of Julia R. Greer.

Last year, California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Pasadena, California, researchers revealed that they had developed a new fabrication technique for printing microsized metal parts containing features about as thick as three or four sheets of paper. Now, the team has reinvented the technique to allow for printing objects a thousand times smaller: 150 nanometers. These parts can be three-to-five-times stronger than similarly sized structures with more orderly atomic arrangements.

University of California (UC), Berkeley, California, announced mechanical engineering faculty Grace Gu was selected as the inaugural recipient of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Livermore, California, Early Career UC Faculty Initiative for her proposal, " Toward AI-Driven Additive Manufacturing for Metal-Ceramic Composite Structures."

A GRCop-42 heat exchanger

Due to its superior thermal conductivity, copper is one of the “hottest” metals for research and development in additive manufacturing. This is desirable in rockets and industrial applications such as electronics, where heat exchange is critical. Second only to silver among metals in its ability to conduct heat, copper is pound-for-pound significantly less expensive. Copper alloys provide enhanced mechanical properties along with that valuable conductivity.