Navy Advances Printed Drone Structures, but Load-Bearing Power Paths Remain Unproven
A conductor embedded inside a composite laminate must do more than carry current. It must remain electrically isolated while the…
Materials & Manufacturing
Yazaki Bamboo Composite Targets 50% Lower Carbon, but Durability Work Remains
Yazaki’s bamboo-filled polypropylene has cleared a stated automotive flammability requirement, but the more difficult qualification issue remains open: reliable performance…
Beehive’s 40-Part Frenzy Engine Faces a 10,000-Unit Manufacturing Test
Beehive Industries has reduced its Frenzy turbojet to roughly 40 parts, including bolts and washers, but consolidation alone does not…
ORNL Prints Three-Arm Nuclear Vessel, but Qualification Remains the Hard Part
Printing the shape is not the same as proving the pressure boundary. Oak Ridge National Laboratory has built a roughly…
Air Force Flies C-17 With Robot-Formed Panel After Tooling Shortage
The difficult part of replacing one damaged C-17 nose panel was not forming the metal. It was justifying the dedicated…
Airbus and Boeing Test Faster Composite Curing, but Assembly Remains the Bottleneck
Removing the autoclave will not, by itself, make composite airframes suitable for single-aisle production. Airbus and Boeing are evaluating lower-infrastructure…
Infinite Composites Adds Automation for Larger, Faster-Built Space Tanks
Building a large composite propellant tank starts with controlling thousands of meters of reinforcement, resin and barrier material as one…
NASA Cuts Rocket Thrust Chamber Weight Over 40% by Eliminating Joints
More than 40% is an unusually large mass reduction for mature rocket propulsion hardware. NASA achieved that reported reduction in…
USAF C-17 Flew With ISF Nose Panel After One-Off Supply Failure
The immediate problem was not damage assessment. It was manufacturing economics. A storm-damaged C-17 needed a replacement left nose panel,…
America Makes Selects 25 Teams to Standardize Metal Additive Supplier Qualification
A repeatable metal additive manufacturing process requires more than a capable machine. Production managers must control the process, document how…
GE Aerospace Links Powder, Machines and Inspection to Stabilize GE9X Blade Production
A GE9X low-pressure turbine blade begins as more than a digital geometry file. Its production depends on titanium aluminide powder…
NIST’s Looping Laser Paths Improve Alloy Mixing, but Qualification Remains Open
Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology have developed custom software that sends a metal 3D printer’s laser…
Stoke Space Adds Five Metal Printers After Reporting Above 90% Utilization
Stoke Space became the first beta user of Additive Industries’ MetalFab 420K in May 2025 and subsequently ordered five additional…
Peak’s California Factory Will Test Whether Passive Cooling Offsets Bulkier Batteries
Colorado-based Peak Energy announced in July that it plans to open a $71 million sodium-ion battery factory near Sacramento in…
Pratt & Whitney F135 Case Project Pushes Large-Scale Metal Additive
Pratt & Whitney and GKN Aerospace have signed a technology development agreement to test a difficult manufacturing question with real…
Self-Healing Aircraft Composites Still Face a Hard Certification Path
Recently, the topic of self-healing composites became once again relevant for aerospace technologies for an obvious reason the primary mode…
U.S. Precision Machining Faces New Tooling and Abrasives Pressure
The precision machining is associated with spindle accuracy, thermal stability, software of machine tool and ability to maintain extreme tolerances….
Army Evaluates CF3D for Repeatable Missile Composite Production
A new Continuous Composites program for the US Army is trying to answer a manufacturing question much more significant than…