The printable components of a missile are shown in this cutaway model.
The newest addition to the arsenal of 3D printed weaponry, which currently includes pistols, rifles and dart guns, is a guided missile.
Using 3D printing researchers at Raytheon Missile Systems have created nearly every component of a small guided missile. The components constructed in this manner include rocket engines, the missile’s fins and parts for the missile’s guidance and control systems. In all the company has already printed 80 percent of what would go into a missile.
Engineers at Raytheon also are exploring the use of 3D printing to create housings for the company's gallium nitride transmitters, fabricate fins for guided artillery shells and lay down conductive materials for electrical circuits (circuits can already be printed with inkjet printers; the next step is to print complicated circuits in three dimensions, matching the very high resolution and performance of silicon ICs).
The multi-faceted goals of Raytheon’s additive manufacturing research is to reduce costs associated with traditional manufacturing, such as machining of parts, streamline the manufacturing process, accelerate the design process and allow for rapid changes because engineers only need to change the digital model representing a given part. By remaining within set parameters, engineers can produce new parts in hours instead of weeks. The design can also be made to be much more complex because with 3D printing you can design geometries that can’t be machined into metal.
From the perspective of the military, stocking raw materials and a 3D printer on, say, an aircraft carrier could enable the Navy to self-produce a nearly unlimited supply of munitions for the carrier’s aircraft on demand. Of course that scenario is still many years in the future, which if you are Raytheon, the largest producer in the world of guided missiles, is probably good news.