Rapid Manufacturing Helps NASA Move to Digital Inspection

While it might not qualify as a Mike Rowe-worthy dirty job, manually inspecting 24,000 parts is certainly tedious. Add to this mind-boggling number the fact that the parts are the surface tiles which protect the space shuttle Endeavour from the intense heat generated from re-entry into the earth’s atmosphere, and that the difference between finding and not finding a slight problem is unthinkable.

Accuracy is obviously of the utmost importance, and in an effort to reduce costly human-error, NASA decided to move towards digital inspection. They contacted Quickparts (Atlanta, GA) to build a housing unit for a new wireless scanner. Using Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM), Quickparts rapidly built the new housing and shipped parts to NASA in a week. No expensive (and time-consuming) tooling was required for producing the final product.

The new scanner, which weighs about 3 lb., captures the length, width and depth of each tile, and sends it to a computer in about three seconds, where NASA technicians can evaluate the results.“This tool allows the inspectors to determine with very high confidence whether a shuttle tile needs to be replaced or just repaired,” said Joe Lavelle, a senior engineer and project manager at NASA Ames. “When they made the measurements manually with the scales, they had to estimate the volume of flaws to a worst-case value because they could not precisely measure the volume with any accuracy. With this scanner, they will actually save tiles and the time-consuming process of replacing them.”