New NASA grant expands in-space manufacturing research

NASA’s long-term exploration goals for missions to the Moon and Mars need reliable in-space manufacturing and assembly processes.

To make these voyages a reality, NASA awarded nearly $750,000 to Assistant Professor Azadeh Haghighi 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.

This grant is a milestone for UIC — the university’s first Early-Stage Innovations grant in at least the past decade — and 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 the Early Stage Innovations (ESI), which is geared toward accelerating 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 portfolio, 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 (CISM-R²) 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 researchers are challenged with various extreme conditions that will impact the welding. There are very low temperatures and rapid temperature gradients, such as the difference between day and night, or shadow and sunlight regions. The pressure is completely different from Earth, creating a low-pressure or near-vacuum situation, which can affect the process-governing physics. Additionally, the microgravity is another factor that adds to the 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 multiscale, multiphysics 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 any reworks 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 different 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 those space conditions.