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Blade Runners: Take A Look Inside This Factory 3D Printing Jet Engine Parts

At ge.com/reports - Blade Runners: Take A Look Inside This Factory 3D Printing Jet Engine Parts - Oct 4, 2017

Additive manufacturing is still a young industry, albeit one going through a growth spurt. Mohammad Ehteshami, who runs GE Additive, expects the industry to grow from $7 billion today to $80 billion in a decade.





But early runs with ProtoCast’s laser-powered printers failed. The blades were cracking when Abrate and the team tried to separate them from the platform on which they were printed.

The submarine, however, had a secret weapon: an Arcam printer that could fuse layers of TiAl powder with an electron beam several times as powerful as the lasers used in typical 3D printers. Abrate reached out to Arcam to tweak the machine’s parameters, make the powder layer thicker and speed up the printing process. Running more experiments, Abrate also learned that preheating the powder before melting it with the electron beam removed much of the residual stress from the parts. “At that point, we knew what to do,” Abrate says.

Avio Aero bought ProtoCast and signed an exclusive agreement with Arcam to supply them modified machines that could print from TiAl. In return for exclusivity, Avio Aero promised Arcam it would buy a set number of printers.