Systems engineering and systems architecting approaches for innovative additive manufactured spacecraft structures

Additive Manufacturing (AM) for space applications is no more only a very impressive and promising production technology, permitting high-speed and low-cost development and delivering, but a real product/process/business game-changer offering opportunities that any space actor cannot lose. At the same time, it represents a very new complex design and development environment which introduction and regular adoption within space industry represents a great challenge. Sapienza University of Rome and RUAG Space share a common understanding about what is necessary to fully leverage the benefits of AM for space systems in terms of different spacecraft architectures design methodologies. A strong mind-set change is requested for the effective introduction of the disruptive Design For Additive Manufacturing (DFAM) logics and rules into the traditional design workflows. In this paper a novel design approach based on the integration of Systems Engineering (SE) and Systems Architecting (SA) methodologies for the development of innovative additive manufactured spacecraft platforms is presented. In particular a smart AM-suited design tool is described and used for the AM re-design of a multifunctional integrated spacecraft lateral panel, as a representative case-study.