NCAME supporting NASA with critical studies on additive manufacturing of novel alloys
Published: Oct 13, 2026 3:00 PM
By Phillip Tutor
Researchers at Auburn Engineering's NCAME are helping NASA with vital information for rocket engine design.
Cost controls, construction timelines and technical improvements that center on additive manufacturing techniques are vital to NASA engineers designing rocket engines necessary for modern-day space travel.
Auburn Engineering’s National Center for Additive Manufacturing Excellence (NCAME) is playing a crucial role in those endeavors.
“We're on the critical path of NASA’s adoption of the technology,” said Nima Shamsaei, the Philpott-WestPoint Stevens Distinguished Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and NCAME’s founding director.
Engineers at Auburn and NASA share a rich history of scientific collaboration. Today, that partnership is fueling several projects involving the expertise of NCAME, founded through a partnership with NASA in 2017. All told, the projects include more than three-quarters of a million dollars in NASA funding.
“NASA is pushing the boundaries of what is possible in space exploration, and that requires materials capable of operating in environments that challenge conventional engineering solutions,” Shamsaei said. “These projects allow our team to explore materials that have never been fully characterized before, develop a deeper understanding of their process-structure-property relationships and provide NASA with the data needed to advance future aerospace systems.”
Shamsaei is joined by three other NCAME researchers in these projects: Shuai Shao, the McWane Professor of Mechanical Engineering; Stefano Beretta, visiting professor of mechanical engineering; and Erfan Maleki, assistant research professor of mechanical engineering.
Three of the projects, totaling over $500,000 in NASA funding, involve characterizing the microstructure and mechanical behavior of the space agency’s latest generation of alloys — called oxide dispersion strengthened alloys — used in rocket engine construction. One of the alloys, GRX-810, is used in the manufacturing of engine components that experience the hottest temperatures and most extreme operating environments, including the nozzle, injector baffle and turbine.
Shao, NCAME’s associate director for research and innovation, calls them “NASA's next-generation materials.”
In a fourth project, funded by a $300,000 NASA award, NCAME is tasked with noticing material defects and internal flaws in additive manufacturing processes. To do so, Auburn researchers are creating defects in bars of Inconel 718, a nickel-based alloy renowned for its strength and endurance of high temperatures.
“The goal,” Beretta said, “is to be able to see the defects more frequently. In the normal process, we will have them, but we don't capture them as frequently as we need for research purposes.”
In this process, called in-situ monitoring, researchers collect infrared signals during laser scans and determine if scanned anomalies in the bars correlate to the known defects that are found. After the alloy bars are fabricated, they are placed in a tomography scanner that allows researchers to view the internal flaws.
“The in-situ monitoring is on the quality control side of it,” Beretta said. “We have the basic understanding of the property, I'm making this part, but I want to make sure it is achieving the quality I wanted.”
The commonality between the projects, Shamsaei said, involves NASA’s desire to include novel alloys and additive manufacturing techniques in its future rocket designs. If successful, the first enhances the engine’s ability to withstand extremely high temperatures, while the latter allows engineers to design motors that are more efficient, more complex and more stable than when using conventional techniques.
As an example, Shao points to the Raptor series of rocket engines designed by aerospace manufacturer SpaceX. The most recent Raptor engine, V3, houses many of its key components inside the structure, a stark difference from the first two Raptor versions.
Taken to the extreme, if NASA’s cumbersome Apollo-era rocket engines are a layman’s visual expectation, the Raptor V3 resembles a sci-fi movie prop: visually arresting yet wholly imaginary.
“It looks like something a kid drew if you give them the idea and said, ‘Draw me a rocket engine,’” Shao said. “It looks extremely slick from the outside. It has nothing. All of those complex channels are on the inside. You cannot see them.”
In this instance, additive manufacturing is the secret sauce. Modern printing techniques that can build three-dimensional machines layer-by-layer allow engine designs that were heretofore impossible to become viable, while also reducing the construction phase to months instead of years.
“We have to provide the understanding of the behavior of these alloys to NASA,” Beretta said. “We are uniquely equipped to do this because of the significant resources we have available at NCAME.”
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