| Followers | 9 |
| Posts | 1597 |
| Boards Moderated | 1 |
| Alias Born | 01/27/2014 |
Friday, October 13, 2017 10:28:45 AM
Behind the Scenes GE’s 3D Metal Printing Farm
Fabbaloo's comentary on recent GE Report.
"The company published a long piece describing their work at a plant in Cameri, Italy, where they have successfully developed a method of 3D printing complex turbine blades for aircraft engines."
At fabbaloo.com - Behind the Scenes GE’s 3D Metal Printing Farm - OCTOBER 12, 2017
The second half of the article:
The problem is that turbine blades must exist in a rather uncomfortable real-life environment. They must withstand significant heat, cold and, as GE puts it, “titanic forces”. They must also spin 42 times per second, placing enormous stresses on the blades.
Thus you cannot simply “print something” and hope it will work. Any flight-critical aircraft parts must be certified for operation.
And that’s where things get very tricky for 3D printing. If you 3D print metal the resulting part’s strength and other characteristics largely depends on the manner in which the material is crystallized. That is controlled by altering the printing parameters of power, speed, material size and type, cooling and post processing.
The process of finding just the right combination of these parameters is a matter of exploration, and is commonly done by 3D metal printing workshops.
It turns out, of course, that GE managed to find the right set of parameters and is actually producing titanium aluminide turbine blades using this new approach.
The moral of the story here is that production parts are utterly different from prototypes. They must be able to handle ALL of the conditions they will experience in application use, and that requires much more work than simply “printing the part”.
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
I didn't notice that the GE Report had a video that I hadn't seen before. Most of it is about the Arcam EBM produced turbine blades. I couldn't find a YouTube link to the video.
Here it is - https://www.facebook.com/GE/videos/1484135044988118/
Fabbaloo's comentary on recent GE Report.
"The company published a long piece describing their work at a plant in Cameri, Italy, where they have successfully developed a method of 3D printing complex turbine blades for aircraft engines."
At fabbaloo.com - Behind the Scenes GE’s 3D Metal Printing Farm - OCTOBER 12, 2017
The second half of the article:
The problem is that turbine blades must exist in a rather uncomfortable real-life environment. They must withstand significant heat, cold and, as GE puts it, “titanic forces”. They must also spin 42 times per second, placing enormous stresses on the blades.
Thus you cannot simply “print something” and hope it will work. Any flight-critical aircraft parts must be certified for operation.
And that’s where things get very tricky for 3D printing. If you 3D print metal the resulting part’s strength and other characteristics largely depends on the manner in which the material is crystallized. That is controlled by altering the printing parameters of power, speed, material size and type, cooling and post processing.
The process of finding just the right combination of these parameters is a matter of exploration, and is commonly done by 3D metal printing workshops.
It turns out, of course, that GE managed to find the right set of parameters and is actually producing titanium aluminide turbine blades using this new approach.
The moral of the story here is that production parts are utterly different from prototypes. They must be able to handle ALL of the conditions they will experience in application use, and that requires much more work than simply “printing the part”.
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
I didn't notice that the GE Report had a video that I hadn't seen before. Most of it is about the Arcam EBM produced turbine blades. I couldn't find a YouTube link to the video.
Here it is - https://www.facebook.com/GE/videos/1484135044988118/
Join the InvestorsHub Community
Register for free to join our community of investors and share your ideas. You will also get access to streaming quotes, interactive charts, trades, portfolio, live options flow and more tools.
