Ricerc@Sapienza

The aerospace industry has used Additive Manufacturing (AM) since its beginnings in the ‘80s. But in the last decade, new advancements in these technologies have led applications to proliferate moving from the prototyping to the direct part manufacturing, rapid tooling, and repairing. AM is a completely new manufacturing process if compared to the conventional subtracting methods. This technology has deeply influenced product design and assembly in the aerospace sector, becoming a strategic technology throughout the entire supply chain. AM enables easy integration of design change.

Aerospace industry is showing increasing interest in the unique possibilities provided by advanced manufacturing technologies applied to very small satellites. In particular, Additive Manufacturing (AM) techniques are always more imposing itself to represent key enabling technologies for a broad range of new space missions and systems.

The aerospace industry has used Additive Manufacturing (AM) since its beginnings in the ‘80s because of its unique capabilities. The present work shows a re-designing and the manufacturing via AM of the structural sub-system of a CubeSat from the nanosatellite class. Specifically, a 1U CubeSat design proposal has been developed according to Design for Additive Manufacturing (DFAM) guidelines, considering the consolidation of the parts for reducing and/or avoiding the assembly issues.