Mary-Louise Hoffman
Lockheed Martin‘s space systems business has partnered with rapid prototyping firm RedEye to build two fuel tanks for a satellite simulation project with a three-dimensional printing technology tool.
The companies used RedEye’s fused deposition modeling system to develop large satellite fuel tank simulators within a compressed time frame, RedEye said Wednesday.
“With RedEye’s machine capacity and engineering support, we were able to successfully build these tank simulators in a fraction of the time and at a fraction of the cost,†said Andrew Bushell, senior manufacturing engineer for Lockheed Martin Space Systems Co.
RedEye says it took the RedEye-Lockheed team almost two weeks to 3D print the fuel tanks and approximately 240 hours to complete final assembly work.
Lockheed has invested in RedEye’s additive manufacturing technology since 2012 and has also leveraged 3D printers from RedEye parent company Stratasys.
