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An Epiphany Of Disruption: GE-Additive Chief Explains How 3D Printing Will Upend Manufacturing

From gereports.com - An Epiphany Of Disruption: GE Additive Chief Explains How 3D Printing Will Upend Manufacturing - Mar 6, 2017

The ending:

In 2016, GE expanded its additive portfolio and spent more than $1 billion to buy controlling stakes in two leading manufacturers of industrial 3D printers: Sweden’s Arcam AB and Germany’s Concept Laser. While Concept Laser’s machines use lasers to shape components from metallic powder, Arcam uses an electron beam, which is more powerful. It enables the machines to print faster and fuse layers as thick at 100 microns, twice the width of what a laser can print. It also can grow parts from wonder materials like titanium aluminate (TiAl), which is 50 percent lighter than steel but very hard to shape. An additive factory in Cameri, Italy, is already printing TiAl turbine blades for the GE9X, a jet engine even larger than the GE90 (see video below).

But GE and Ehteshami are just getting started. GE Chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt wrote in his annual letter to shareowners that the company believed “the long-term market potential for additive manufacturing (was) huge at about $75 billion. We plan to build a business with $1 billion of revenue in additive equipment and service by 2020, from $300 million today,” he said. The Arcam and Concept Laser investments are GE’s first steps to grow its 3D printing base outside GE and across multiple industries, Ehteshami says. He says that applications for Arcam and Concept Laser machines will include aerospace and the auto industry, as well as medical implants and jewelry.

Several GE businesses, including Aviation, Oil & Gas, Power and Healthcare, are already benefiting from additive manufacturing. Working closely with engineers at GE Global Research, who built one of the first laser-powered 3D printers in the early 1990s, GE Additive recently opened the Additive Training Center (ATC) near Cincinnati. The 130,000-square-foot facility holds some 30 machines that print metal and as many as 40 machines that print plastic. (GE has a similar facility, called the Center for Additive Technologies Advancement, near Pittsburgh).

Several times a year, the ATC holds a “manufacturing boot camp.” It trains hundreds of engineers, who then fan out across GE to spread the additive gospel. “We pay them to play with the machines,” Ehteshami says. “We give them a real problem and tell them ‘go figure it out and print it.’ ”

The ATC center helps manufacturing engineers master the machines, but it also trains materials specialists to reshape supply chains. “Today, there are hundreds of big planes flying between cities around the world and carrying machine components,” Ehteshami says. “Tomorrow, you won’t need to do all of that. You’ll just print what you need.”

Ehteshami calls his additive awakening an “epiphany of disruption.” Says Ehteshami: “Once you start thinking about it, you realize both intellectually and emotionally ‘Oh my God, if I don’t start moving, somebody else will.’ You are excited because you are an engineer, but you are also afraid because you are a human being. Both of these feelings start pulling at you to say: ‘I’ve got to go, I’ve got to go.’ And you start running.”



Top and above: “I was excited but also disturbed,” says Mohammad Ehteshami after a vendor printed an complex part for a jet engine. “I knew that we found a solution, but I also saw that this technology could eliminate what we’ve done for years and years and put a lot of pressure on our financial model.” Images credit: Adam Senatori for GE Reports



An Arcam 3D printer at GE’s Center for Additive Technologies Advancement. GE acquired a majority stake in Arcam last fall. The machine uses an electron beam, which is more powerful than laser. The beam enables the machines to print faster and fuse layers as thick at 100 microns, twice the width of what a laser can print. It also can grow parts from wonder materials like titanium aluminate (TiAl), which is 50 percent lighter than steel but very hard to shape. Image credit: Mark Trent for GE Reports







But Ehteshami, who rises before dawn for his daily run and is one of GE Aviation’s most seasoned engineers at age 61, doesn’t easily give up. Originally from Iran, he grew up on a dusty pistachio farm. His mother, the only literate woman in his desert village, pushed him to study science. When he received a visa to attend university in the U.S., he supported himself as a Boston taxi driver and a construction worker (and later, as a popular television personality). At GE, he spent six grueling years developing the GE90 jet engine, the world’s largest and most powerful jet engine in service. He had one last idea for getting the nozzle made....