NASA grant expands in-space manufacturing research at UIC

NASA’s long-term exploration goals for missions to the moon and Mars require reliable in-space manufacturing and assembly processes. To make these voyages a reality, NASA has awarded nearly $750,000 to Azadeh Haghighi, assistant professor of mechanical and industrial engineering, for a project titled “Weld-ASSIST: Weldability Assessment for In-Space Conditions using a Digital Twin.” She will lead a multi-university team that includes researchers from Pennsylvania State University and Iowa State University.

The grant highlights the competitiveness of Haghighi’s work. Haghighi is one of only two people to receive the grant this year under the Computational Materials Engineering for Lunar Metals Welding category of NASA’s Early Stage Innovations program, which aims to accelerate the development of groundbreaking, high-risk/high-payoff space technologies to support the future space science and exploration needs of NASA, other government agencies and the commercial space sector.

The grant expands UIC’s in-space manufacturing research, which includes a $4.6 million grant awarded to associate professor Yayue Pan to open the Center for In-Space Manufacturing: Recycling and Regolith Processing at UIC.

While Haghighi’s peers are researching additive manufacturing using regolith — a blanket of loose deposits covering solid rock — Haghighi is investigating high-energy laser processing and manufacturing technologies such as welding in space, which will allow larger and stronger structures to be built.

“The physics of welding is very well understood on Earth, but not in space,” said Haghighi, director of the Smarture Lab at UIC. “Our goal is to close that knowledge gap so we can reliably build the next generation of space habitats and infrastructure.”

For welding in space, the challenge is extreme conditions. There are very low temperatures and rapid temperature gradients, such as the difference between day and night, or shadow and sunlight. The pressure is completely different from Earth, creating a low-pressure or near-vacuum environment, which can affect the physics that govern welding. Microgravity — what astronauts experience as weightlessness — is another challenge.

“We already know that a weld’s thermal history and molten pool behaviors are really crucial to the weld quality, and we want to understand all these multi-scale, multi-physics phenomena that are happening during welding in space conditions,” she said. “The unique challenges and extreme conditions of space require advanced welding techniques and computational tools to ensure reliability, repeatability, safety and structural integrity in one-shot weld scenarios.”

A one-shot weld means doing it once and perfectly the first time, which will minimize the need for a rework and significantly reduce mission costs.

An additional part of the research is a toolbox Haghighi and her team are creating for NASA using this newly established knowledge. The researchers will be coupling numerical models with machine learning to create predictive physics-informed machine learning models. The models will be validated through Earth-based experiments, parabolic flight tests and publicly available data from databases and agencies worldwide.

“The ICME-based (integrated computational materials engineering) model and accompanying toolkit that we plan to develop are going to be the first ever for space conditions,” Haghighi said. “NASA can deploy and use them later on in their missions. For example, they can input the ambient space conditions, material data and laser/weld parameters, and our algorithms can tell them they will get high-quality welds with this much probability — or whether they can even weld in those space conditions or not.”

She added the ultimate goal is to provide corrective process guidelines for NASA, such as how to adjust laser power or velocity to enhance weld quality under space conditions.

— David Staudacher, UIC College of Engineering