Titanium Wind Tunnel Balance Leveraging Additive Manufacturing

Titanium force transducers have among the highest strength-to-Young's modulus ratios of common transducer materials. This can be leveraged to increase the sensitivity of the transducer relative to other materials or to increase the structural safety factor of the transducer for a given sensitivity. It is surprising then that no titanium wind tunnel balances have been reported in the literature or produced by NASA. With the increasing maturation of additive manufacturing technology, this work explores additively manufacturing a titanium wind tunnel balance. Additive manufacturing of the balance was completed in less than 1 week. Then, several secondary finishing and machining operations were performed to finalize the balance geometry, and it was strain gaged and calibrated. Calibration results confirm that the titanium balance has approximately 68% higher output compared to a steel balance of identical geometry and applied load. Based on the calibration results, hysteresis, pure error, and accuracy of the titanium balance are reported. These performance characteristics are comparable to conventionally manufactured state-of-the-art steel balances.