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"3D printing isn't anything new at GE," says Prabhjot Singh, Manager of GE's Additive Manufacturing Lab in Schenectady, New York. "It's been around for decades and has been typically used to repair worn-out or broken down, high-value industrial parts such as compressor blades or gears using laser cladding technology."

"The idea is to service a multitude of businesses-from oil and gas, to aviation, transportation, and distributed power-all under the same roof."
AMIT KUMAR
This allows you to print on existing materials or parts with the same, or even a different material. But, in the last two years, GE has taken the technology from a repair aid to one that has already pushed the frontiers of engineering design. The undisputed poster child of its efforts in this department is the fuel nozzle.

The fuel nozzle may not have an impressive sounding name, but it plays a critical role in the inferno of an aircraft's engine in which it nestles while spraying jet fuel into it. So, it goes without saying that the nozzle has to be durable under both high pressure and intense heat (around 3,000 Fahrenheit).

"Before GE targeted it for a reconfiguration, the nozzle was made up of 20 disparate parts procured from independent suppliers that were then painstakingly brazed and welded together. 3D printing completely transformed that process," said Greg Morris, GE Aviation's general manager for additive technologies.


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Prior to working for GE, Morris ran his own outfit, Morris Technologies, a Cincinnati-based rapid prototyping company that had closely worked with GE for over a decade. Morris' firm had been busy experimenting with metal sintering as well as super alloys made up of amalgams of cobalt and chrome for several years. In 2011, the firm zeroed in on the fuel nozzle as the part most appropriate for a makeover. When GE acquired the company in 2012, the momentum to bring the fuel nozzle to life via 3D printing arrived.

The end result is an engineering marvel, one monolithic piece that has replicated the complex interior passageways and chambers of the old nozzle down to every twist and turn thanks to the miracle of direct metal laser melting where fine alloy powder is sprayed onto a platform in a printer and then heated by a laser, and repeated 3,000 times until the part is formed. What makes the new nozzle so special isn't just that it has converted a many-steps engineering and manufacturing process into just one. It is also a miracle of material science since it happens to be both 25% lighter in weight, as well as a staggering five times more durable than its older sibling, all of which translates to a savings of around US $3 million per aircraft, per year for any airline flying a plane equipped with GE's next generation LEAP engine, developed by CFM International, a joint venture between GE and France's Snecma (Safran).

"We simply could not do this level of production for such a complex part without [the] 3D additive process," Morris said.

Morris said that so far there have been orders for over 8,000 of these engines totaling $80 billion, each equipped with 19 3D printed fuel nozzles, scheduled to go into the Airbus A320neo, the Boeing 737 MAX, and the Boeing 777X. Here lies Morris' and GE's challenge: Try and print 100,000 fuel nozzles by 2020 and eventually ramp up capacity to 44,000 of them a year—a goal that looks unreachable based on current levels of 3D printing technology. This means that places like the Chakan plant will be pressed into service to handle global production shortfalls by simply printing out nozzles from India thanks to a CAD design of the part housed on their server.
http://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-ge-is-using-3d-printing-to-unleash-the-biggest-revolution-in-large-scale-manufacturing/