Ryan McClelland

"Generative Design and Digital Manufacturing: using AI and robots to build spaceflight structures"

ABSTRACT -- Digital Engineering technologies are transforming long-stagnant development processes by applying the tremendous advancements in Information Technology (IT) to classical engineering tasks such as design, analysis, and fabrication of space-flight structures. Generative Design leverages developments in AI and Cloud computing to enable a paradigm shift in the design process, allowing the engineer to focus on defining the requirements and objectives of the design, while AI explores the design space and generates optimized designs which comply with the input requirements. Digital Manufacturing allows these complex lightweight designs to be efficiently manufactured by directly fabricating from the resulting 3D models, using both additive and subtractive techniques. The development of these two Digital Engineering technologies promises significant mass savings while simultaneously reducing design development time from months to days; 2x-4x improvements in stiffness/mass/strength and 5x-10x reduction in development time/cost have been realized in Goddard applications. This talk describes the development of a process applying these technologies to spaceflight instrument structures, gives application examples, examines the limitations and pitfalls, and presents a vision for the future.

SPEAKER -- Ryan McClelland is a Research Engineer in NASA GSFC's Instrument Systems and Technology Division (ISTD) focused on developing and applying Digital Engineering technologies. He is also currently the lead engineer on the Next Generation X-Ray Optics (NGXO) project. His previous technology development experience includes work on aluminum foam core optical systems and non-linear effects of clearances in kinematic mechanisms. Ryan has worked on flight missions, with designs currently on orbit aboard the Hubble Space Telescope and International Space Station. Recently, he served as the Roman Space Telescope Instrument Carrier Manager. His work on Generative Design was featured in Digital Engineering 24/7 magazine, and he has authored or co-authored 60 papers on opto-mechanical systems. He received a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering, summa cum laude, from the University of Maryland.

Engineering Colloquium home page: https://ecolloq.gsfc.nasa.gov