German software company Hyperganic has developed a 3D-printed rocket engine prototype, which was completely designed by artificial intelligence.
Unlike a traditional rocket engine, which consists of individually designed parts that are combined together, the AI-designed demonstrator is 3D printed as one continuous piece.
This includes both the combustion chamber where fuel and oxidiser is burned and the surface channels, through which the fuel is circulated to cool the chamber and keep it from overheating.

"In a rocket, the cooling channels are generally welded onto the combustion chamber, which through wear and tear can cause errors and explosions," explained Hyperganic's design director Duy-Anh Pham.
"The components are engineered separately, so the design is not actually holistically optimised to be the best, most efficient it can be," he continued. "Our engine in contrast is made up of only one piece, that has been designed to have the lowest weight and most effective cooling, and so the highest possible performance for a given rocket."
To create the engine, a rocket scientist first stipulated the core features of a rocket engine ? the shape of the combustion chamber and the necessary cooling performance.
Rather than being translated into CAD files, this information is expressed as formulas and stored in an Excel sheet, in a format that can be read by Hyperganic's algorithm.
This algorithm then uses the data to generate the geometry of th...