Accomplished leaders building GE’s legacy. Together with our customers, we’re proving that no one is ever limited to only affordable, reliable, or sustainable energy. Jet engine designers love this strong, heat-resistant wonder material, also known as TiAl. GE’s LEAP engine with 3D printed parts helps rake in $31 B at Paris Air Show. FORECAST 3D has been providing 3D printing & custom manufacturing to our customers in a variety of industries ranging from healthcare to aerospace, consumer goods to design. 3D printing is still so new that Martinello, who is 37, is often learning on the job. Our technology, global network, and exceptional team is fueled by a mission—building a world that works. Tune in or catch up on GE’s latest investor events and reports. That's the step that GE Aviation took when it recently fired up a simple jet engine made entirely of 3D-printed parts in a test stand normally reserved for commercial jet power plants. Explore GE’s recent and historic SEC filings. GE Aviation is a world-leading provider of aircraft engines, systems and avionics. GE plans to produce 100,000 3D-printed components for the next-generation GE9X and Leap models Courtesy of GE Aviation Fortunately for GE, the company now owns two of the largest metal 3D printer … That’s a big deal given that fuel accounts for about 19 percent of an airline’s operating costs. One of the team’s tasks early on was making sure that brackets coming out of the machines were of identical quality. I designed the whole engine from scratch with visual cues to certain existing engines. “In the design of jet engines, complexity used to be expensive," Ehteshami says. “These are big blades,” says Giorgio Abrate, general manager for engineering at Avio Aero. Read More A single machine can simultaneously print six turbine blades directly from a computer file by using a powerful 3-kilowatt electron beam. Commercializing GE’s technology and IP to accelerate growth and achieve market differentiation. Access GE’s recent and historic Annual Reports and accompanying materials. Several parts benefit from the use of custom supports. “We want to have everything quantified and take variation out of the process,” Martinello says. Top: Brandel (left) and Martinello (right) hold in their hands 3D-printed brackets for the GEnx-2B engine. Explore GE’s recent and historic SEC filings. GE Aviation plans to mass-produce them on Concept Laser 3D printers. GE Additive Print Services Center is a full-scale, certified AS9100/ISO9001 additive printing and post-processing facility. The FAA recently cleared the first 3D printed part in a commercial jet engine from GE. Mohammad Ehteshami, who launched GE Additive, expects the industry to grow from $7 billion today to $80 billion in a decade. “There’s no part that just comes off a printer and goes straight into the engine,” Gatlin says. “The location was part of our strategy,” Abrate says. That’s when a group of designers working at the ATC came up with a clever solution: fitting all the parts like interlocking fingers onto a single “build plate” the size of an average computer screen. Creating the energy technologies of the future and improving the power networks that we depend on today. “I’ve been doing this for three years now, but I still have to take a step back and remind myself what it is we are trying to do and why,” he says. “A lot of the things we do here, we are doing for the very first time. “But we had positive experiences with 3D printing on a military project.”, The company decided to take advantage of the nearby Joint Strike Fighter assembly plant and set up its additive manufacturing shop nearby. This is an engineer’s dream." Explore a career with us. We connect capital to infrastructure and deliver innovative financial solutions that help make the world work better. Access important shareholder information. The first GEnx engines used brackets made with traditional methods such as milling. I think that breeds a certain amount of excitement, a certain amount of energy, and requires a certain culture.” Image credit: GE Aviation. GE's dedicated team, leading technology, and global reach and capabilities help the world work more efficiently, reliably, and safely. The Cameri plant employs eight specialized hourly workers feeding the machines with powder, removing and cleaning the printed parts, and doing maintenance. 3D printing and dozens of other new technologies used for the first time in a civilian turboprop engine allowed the team to combine 855 separate components into just 12, shave off more than 100 pounds in weight, improve fuel burn by as much as 20 percent, give it 10 percent more power and simplify maintenance. Our proprietary process optimizes every aspect of aerospace development and enables faster, more frequent, and lower cost access to space. Offering a suite of products to help unlock the full potential of additive manufacturing. “For us to step up and bet the engine on this technology is a big deal,” Robert Schafrik, then GE Aviation’s materials and process engineering general manager, told FlightGlobal. what the prefix means in different engine families of GE waukesha.ATGL,APG,VHP,VGF,VSG,275 GL. Additive ManufacturingAerospace3D printingGE. Sixty other designs are being perfected, some reducing the number of parts … The aluminium manifold inlet, 3D printed on a Concept Laser X LINE 2000R from GE Additive, took five days to complete. Cameri is the home of the only final assembly plant outside the United States for Lockheed Martin’s F-35B Joint Strike Fighter, a stealthy jet that can take off and land vertically. The list includes printing parameters, but also heat treatment and inspection steps. Aircraft engineering . Image credit: Adam Senatori for GE Reports Running more experiments, he also learned that preheating the powder before printing removed much of the residual stress from the finished parts. GE’s new LEAP and GE9x jet engines are among the most ambitious programs in the company’s history. “We called it ‘the submarine’ because it was so narrow you couldn’t walk past the people working with the machines.”. More than a third of the ATP is 3D-printed from advanced alloys. GE has been working on the engine for the last three years. “It took time for it to sink in, before we realized that this is exactly what additive can be used for, to demonstrate its speed and low cost.”. GE Aviation was developing its own 3D printing program near its headquarters in Cincinnati. He says that when GE acquired Avio Aero in 2013, “it was really fortunate because everything accelerated after that.”. GE Aviation acquired Avio Aero in 2013 and developed the GE9X engine for Boeing’s next-generation 777X jets. The 3D-printed blades spin inside the engine at 2,500 times per minute and face searing heat and titanic forces. “This factory has helped us understand what the art of the possible is with additive manufacturing,” said David Joyce, president and CEO of GE Aviation. “When you are printing it, it’s hard to tell whether it’s one part or four parts, but when you cut them off the plate, they separate and you have an aircraft’s worth of brackets in one build.”. Ignition, Combustion and Detonation engineering . Starting with rockets, our Stargate factory vertically integrates robotics, software, and patented 3D printing technologies to digitize manufacturing. Explore a timeline of GE technologies that have spurred transformation across the world. As a senior engineer for additive design at GE Aviation’s Additive Technology Center (ATC) in Cincinnati, in 2016 he helped bring to mass production a 3D-printed fuel nozzle that efficiently sprays fuel inside the LEAP jet engine. “When the GEnx program kicked off, they just hogged the brackets out of a big block of metal,” Martinello says. Discover how our people & technology are solving global issues, improving lives, and changing industries. 3D printing has rightfully gotten a lot of buzz because of the marvels it can do. The group, based in the U.S. and also in Germany, would get together every day on a 7:30 a.m. conference call to track their progress and lay out their next steps. We build intelligent devices, data analytics, applications and services to enable healthcare practitioners to deliver care more efficiently and with better outcomes. Tune in or catch up on GE’s latest investor events and reports. To keep an eye on the conditions inside the machines, the engineers installed sensors and high-resolution cameras to monitor the power and stability of the laser, the oxygen levels in the printing chamber and other factors. Learn how we’re delivering on our priorities. Image credit: Tomas Kellner for GE Reports. For the last four years GE has been manufacturing 3D printed fuel nozzles for the A320's jet engine. It was developing a 3D printed fuel nozzle for a new jet engine called the LEAP and working with Greg Morris, the founder of Morris Technologies and another leading light in the additive movement. But take a short ride through the rolling fields of the fertile Po Valley that surround it and you’ll discover a startling contrast. According to GE … Getting the part ready for printing was another riddle. “Fundamental engineering principles still apply. “They were already convinced,” Abrate says. GE now prints 600 of them per week as a single piece. The GE90 is one of the world’s most powerful jet engines. The 3D printed fuel nozzle inside the GE9X was 3D printed by Morris Technologies, which was acquired by GE in 2012. June 26, 2017 Staff. By then, Avio Aero bought ProtoCast and signed an exclusive agreement with Arcam to acquire a set number of the modified machines. But  TiAl is also very brittle. Discover how our people & technology are solving global issues, improving lives, and changing industries. At the time, word got out that GE Aviation had used TiAl blades inside the GEnx jet engine it was developing for Boeing’s Dreamliner. A culture of integrity, compliance, safety, and respect for human rights, while reducing our environmental footprint. Transforming how industry solves its toughest challenges by bringing simplicity, speed and scale to digital transformation. Accomplished leaders building GE’s legacy. Last year, GE Additive and GE Aviation proposed a collaborative metal additive manufacturing program with the U.S. Air Force to accelerate the adoption of AM for spare parts. Martinello knows this as well as anyone. Explore the latest stories, news, downloads, and press tools. Transforming how industry solves its toughest challenges by bringing simplicity, speed and scale to digital transformation. “Minor tweaks here and there are OK in the development phase, but when you get into production, everything has to be locked down," says Danny Brandel, a lead manufacturing engineer at the ATC and a member of the team. “Air flow is pretty critical in terms of getting parts with good internal and external quality,” Brandel says. These and other new materials and technologies will help make the engine 10 percent more fuel-efficient than its predecessor, the GE90. The two … GE's dedicated team, leading technology, and global reach and capabilities help the world work more efficiently, reliably, and safely. A model of a 2-spool high bypass turbofan. “We ran a lot of experiments to get the job right.” Read the latest GE financial news releases and stories. We’re deeply proud of GE employees around the world rising to the challenge. When Avio Aero showed GE what it was doing with the wonder metal, the American company quickly grasped the magnitude of the breakthrough. Read on to see how. The size of a walnut, this wickedly complex metal part was previously made from 20 components. The size of a walnut, this … Boeing 777X: GE9X engines with 300 3D printed parts powers largest twin-engine jetliner in first flight GE Aviation has announced that American multinational aerospace giant Boeing has … Says one of the engineers, Dario Mantegazza, about 3D printing: “You have the ultimate manufacturing freedom.”. Explore a timeline of GE technologies that have spurred transformation across the world. Contact information for general inquiries and feedback. Answers to popular and relevant inquiries. Image credit: GE Aviation. It weighs 50 percent less than the metal alloys typically used in aviation. But Martinello and his colleagues have just taken that feat to a new level. They selected Concept Laser’s M2 printer, a fast, midsize machine that uses a pair of lasers to print four brackets at a time. Above: The 3D printed nozzle combined all 20 parts into a single unit, but it also weighed 25 percent less. The company is already using individual 3D-printed fuel nozzles and other parts in its jet engines and gas turbines. For example, they took a system designed to air out the smoke produced when the powerful lasers hit and melt the layers of powder into the desired shape, and gave it more power. At GE, we rise to the challenge of building a world that works. 3D printed aircraft component . Electric motors & generators engineering . The engineers from ATC and Auburn spent the spring collaborating and comparing notes so that Auburn will be ready to start cranking out the brackets. A GEnx engine on a test stand in Peebles, Ohio. “It looks like one of those woodblock puzzles, where all the pieces fit together,” Gatlin says. The first GE jet engine to actually take flight while using a 3-D-printed part is the GE90. The engine in question is actually a 3D-printed model, designed by GE. Commercializing GE’s technology and IP to accelerate growth and achieve market differentiation. As a result, more than a third of the engine is 3D-printed. He says this is especially important in aviation because of tight FAA regulations due to the importance of safety and quality in air travel. Now there's only one piece—and it's five times stronger. For example, I think Rolls-Royce makes the best-looking fans, so there's some resemblance there... By the way, this model was featured on SolidSmack. We’re continuing to do all we can to support our customers and employees during this unprecedented time. “It’s our first program we certified on a Concept Laser machine, and it’s also the first project we’ve taken from design to production in less than 10 months.”. Access important shareholder information. The goal is to help organizations adopt additive manufacturing technology faster by offering the ability to take parts from an idea to production. By embracing diverse teams and perspectives, we are better equipped to build a world that works. We wanted to promote 3D printing to potential customers and they were all coming here.”, That gamble required access to 3D printers, which Avio Aero obtained by partnering with ProtoCast, an Italian 3D-printing pioneer based in a workshop a short drive from Cameri. The team also implemented small design tweaks that reduced the bracket’s weight by 10 percent. In 2016, GE  took a majority stake in Arcam and launched GE Additive, a new business focusing on additive manufacturing technologies like 3D printing. The Blade Runners: This Factory Is 3D Printing ... - GE.com By embracing diverse teams and perspectives, we are better equipped to build a world that works. More than a third of the ATP engine’s parts will be crafted in 3D printers. The Northern Italian town of Cameri could be easily mistaken for a quiet farming commune. For example, they are working on significant cost- and weight-reduction projects across their other engine lines like the LEAP, the GE9X engine for Boeing’s new 777X widebody jet, and military programs. The fist-sized T25 housing for a compressor inlet temperature sensor was fabricated by GE Aviation and will be retrofitted to over 400 GE90-94B jet engines on Boeing 777 aircraft. “But as soon as you have to print thousands of copies of the same part consistently, you are in a territory that’s both similar to traditional manufacturing, but also more complex than anything that we’ve had before.”. “We just had to machine some bolt holes and some clevis pins and we were done,” he says. To do so, the team also had to “production-proof” the new line of printers for the part. Access GE’s recent and historic Annual Reports and accompanying materials. They started by focusing on individual machines, but in the future, they will feed the data into the cloud, monitor the parameters across a whole fleet of printers and look for patterns that will allow them to spot potential problems early. Back in Cincinnati, Gatlin, Martinello, Brandel and their colleagues are already working on their next projects. For more than 25 years, our focus has been on bringing your ideas to life faster than you thought “The Lockheed plant made the town become very visible among aerospace companies. A few weeks ago General Electric announced that the FAA (U.S. Federal Aviation Administration) cleared their first 3D printed part to fly. Read the results of the 2020 GE Global Innovation Barometer, titled “Pride and Protectionism: A Quest for Innovation Agency.”. Also known as additive manufacturing, it has opened new paths for designers to create custom shapes that were previously too expensive or downright impossible to make. “If it has only 50 percent of the weight of the nickel alloys you’ve got to believe this is here to stay.”, GE cast the blades in a foundry, but Avio Aero, which wanted to go after the emerging TiAl market, bet on 3D printing. 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