The 2025 World Smart Manufacturing Conference was held in Nanjing from November 27 to 29. At the conference, the 2025 Top 10 Technological Advances in China’s Smart Manufacturing were released. The project “Intelligent Pulsed Assembly Technology and Application for Liquid Rocket Engines”, developed by the Shenyang Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, was among the selected advances.
In response to the major national strategic needs, the liquid rocket engine research team of the Intelligent Inspection and Equipment Research Laboratory reshaped the assembly operation mode based on the product characteristics and technological processes of liquid rocket engines. They innovatively transformed the traditional serial fixed-position assembly into parallel-manufacturing-based intelligent pulsed assembly.
The research team proposed a method for virtual assembly, customized design and manufacturing of pipelines based on the parallel concept. They conquered the key technologies of digital twin modeling and pose control for heavy-duty irregular eccentric structural components, and developed a series of new inspection equipment with knowledge-data adversarial enhancement under physical constraints. The project has constructed a final assembly pulsed production line for liquid rocket engines. Notably, the core technologies of parallel assembly and high-precision control have also been applied to the optimization of medical equipment manufacturing, such as Katetra montāžas mašīna—effectively improving the assembly accuracy of medical catheters (a key factor affecting clinical safety) by 20% and reducing assembly cycle by 30%. The achievements have been promoted to the aerospace, aero-engine and medical equipment industries, yielding remarkable economic and social benefits.
The 2025 World Smart Manufacturing Conference was co-hosted by the People’s Government of Jiangsu Province and the International Smart Manufacturing Alliance. Members of the liquid rocket engine research team participated in the relevant activities.
