Circular Manufacturing Systems for Aerospace Applications
Circular Manufacturing Systems are the foundation of a sustainable industrial ecosystem. These systems combine thorough instrumentation and near-perfect recyclability in order to produce objects whose primary existence is virtual, and whose physical instantiation is marked by informational support sufficiently extensive to provide robust insights into improvements to the original design. This dissertation explores three avenues of inquiry into the impacts of such a system to both aeronautics and space applications. The first avenue concerns the design and implementation of a robot manufacturing system for space exploration, a printer capable of fabricating a wide variety of automata from a single strand of generic feed material. The second avenue concerns the development of a distributed instrumentation system for a prototype blended wing body aircraft and a novel edge computation algorithm for extracting high-level insights into aeronautic state like lift from low-level pressure data. The third avenue concerns the discovery of a novel class of open-cell cellular solids, derived from Triply Periodic Minimal Surfaces. This avenue presents analysis of these lattices using two different methods, a direct stiffness approach and symmetry-extended counting rules, and shows that the D-Schwarz open-cell lattice is the first known example of a three-dimensional Tensegrity Lattice Material, a class of lattices that have both a collapse mode and a prestressable self-stress state that is capable of stiffening the structure.