Toward cleaner space explorations ; a comparative life cycle assessment of spacecraft propeller tank manufacturing technologies

Funding Information: The authors wish to thank FormTech GmbH, MT Aerospace AG, Omnidea Lda, and Omnidea-RTG for providing useful data in conducting this study. Publisher Copyright: © The Author(s) 2024. ; The traditional method of manufacturing propellant tanks for rockets and spaceships involves significant amounts of forging, and machining, making it expensive and environmentally unfriendly. A novel approach for manufacturing propellant tanks that reduces the need for machining and friction stir welding processes has been presented in this paper. This approach involves manufacturing a tank half starting from a single metal plate, using innovative and advanced metal forming processes such as hot stretch forming, magnetic pulse forming, hub forming, and integrated stiffened cylinder (ISC) flow forming followed by orbital welding of two tank halves. A life cycle assessment (LCA) study was conducted in accordance with ISO 14044:2006 standard using the ReCiPe 2016 Midpoint (H) method to compare the environmental impacts of the traditional and newly developed approaches for manufacturing propellant tanks. The results of the LCA study showed that the new approach based on advanced forming technologies reduced carbon footprint by 40%, cumulative energy demand by 35%, water footprint by 17%, and materials waste by 4% compared to traditional manufacturing. The lower environmental impact of the new approach was attributed to a decrease in friction stir welding requirements due to the implementation of advanced forming techniques that enable integrated tank production. This lowered the overall energy consumption in the novel approach by a factor of 1.5 and in turn resulted in lower environmental impact compared to traditional forging and machining-based method. Furthermore, a futuristic scenario that involves in-house tank production using the novel approach with minimal transportation of inventories was also simulated. Based on the LCA results, it was seen that the newly developed approach for manufacturing propellant ...