Aluminum Rocket Engine Injector Fabricated Using 3D Additive Manufacturing

Liquid rocket engine injectors can be extremely expensive to manufacture and hard to iterate to achieve high performance. Internal sealing points can also be the source of reliability issues. The technology disclosed here covers the application of a 3D additive manufacturing (AM) process to produce a functional aluminum injector for liquid propellant rocket engines, along with injector and overall engine design features that optimize the application of such processes to improve performance, reliability, and affordability relative to components produced using standard machining processes and designs. Aluminum was used for the injector instead of higher- temperature metals like stainless steel because its thermal conductance properties provide more opportunity to leverage the cooling potential of liquid oxygen and other cryogenic propellants.