Additive manufacturing-or 3-D printing-is expected to help at least one competitor seeking to build the next $1 billion U.S. Air Force rocket engine to accelerate the design and production time. But one company executive warns that a hasty rush to 3-D printing is dangerous. The process dramatically reduces cycle time to produce designs and parts. A fervent advocate of the technology, Jay Littles, director of advanced launch programs at Aerojet Rocketdyne, cautions that engineers should not cut corners in the validation process. "What scares me the most about these processes is [how] quickly you can go from something that is a [computer-aided design] that looks like a component, and can-if you have a machine-make 'something' that looks a whole lot like a component. But... the potential to not necessarily understand how the material that looks like Inconel 625 may not perform that way," is inherent, Littles says. "If rigorous material characterization and design system work is not done up front, it [has] the potential to... give the overall technology a bad name."
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