Comment on plasma cutting video by Jason Michael Saunders, referring to 3D printed rockets
Jason,
I watched this Genius of 3D Printed Rockets video the other day. They are using plasma discharge heating, but it is not very well controlled at all. They say “it works really precisely”, but it throws off heat and light and bits of wire, and fluctuates a lot. It only needs to melt the aluminum wire so that it flows and bonds properly, and maintain the environment of the deposition to assure proper cooling and crystallization.
They do little monitoring at a micro-scale, and don’t seem to be using more than one wire feed. No mention of ribbons, meshes, composites, chemistry, cooling, pressures, or metallurgy at all. Maybe it was just a fluff piece to raise stock prices, but it seemed rather sad to me. It is so trivial to solve for the controls – constraining it to be quiet, stable, efficient and fast. It is really none of those, and what is sad, is they don’t even seem to have tried. They are right about the economics of replacing whole engine components with 3D printed parts. But then they did not apply a design philosophy to the whole rockets, particularly to quiet, stable, efficient combustion of high energy density fuels. The technology is decades old, their groups are still stove-piped and not working as a whole.
Next time you make a cutting video, add scales, temperatures and conditions. It looks really “science-y” (joking), but it also is what you need to model and simulate and simplify in the modeling phase, not by processing tons of materials.
I did not realize you had these skills and interests. Or you told me and I forgot. If you need anything, just ask. I want you to be successful – to create new things that change the world and how we see it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kz165f1g8-E
Richard Collins, Director, The Internet Foundation
19 May 2022 – a “ship” made of small blue and red CO2 cannisters.
LOL! When I review topics and issues on the Internet, for the Internet Foundation, there are NEVER one or two options, usually thousands or tens of thousands. To be precise, there are as many opinions and choices, on every issue, as there are people, including ones who died and left notes. I do like those metallic colors. But I also saw flames on copper that yielded whole rainbows and rivers of colors.
Thanks for sharing. Thanks for all the art and beauty you bring into the world. It is your choosing that has a lot to do with the beauty of it. There are lots of things in the world, you tend to point out the better ones.
Watching you move it just now, I realized it would make a great space vehicle, assembled from many rocket sections then held together and flown as an integral whole. I am working on force fields of many sorts, starting with the simple “magnetic” ones. But now there are laser generated and array generated force fields of many sorts. Modular space habitats would be easier to assemble as needed, and flown, if they have well known and understood properties and dimensions.
