From the recent March 2017 GE investor conference. GE expects to have 10,000 metal AM parts flying yet this year. They continue to move forward with the build-out effort. With inspection costs what they are, they will undoubtedly move to some form of IPQA before too much longer. We will see. In another area of the conference, they declare that the FAA for aero, and FDA for medical, are on board with metal AM. Now we just have to get them on board with PR3D.
All the best,
Silversmith
Joe Mastrangelo - General Electric Company - President & CEO, Gas Power Systems
Now on the other side there continues to be what I would call traditional cost out examples in our business.....
The other two examples I would like to just spend a moment on are on the bottom of the page, additive examples. So these two examples of the
DLN fuel nozzle tip and an E class combustor ring. These are examples of not, hey, we have tested and we can do something. This isn't you coming
to visit a factory and getting a GE keychain that is printed on an additive machine. We have got 8,400 of these fuel nozzles out in the field running
today. By the end of the year we should be above 10,000.
We are getting closer and closer to the hot section of the gas turbine, and John will talk about the development, and that is why this 65% roadmap
is so important because it enables this cost out that you see on the bottom of the page. The combustor ring improves the part life by 25%, takes
out the number of parts and the welding and the variation in manufacturing and drives 30% cost out.
So we don't just do additive to be cutting edge, we are doing additive to increase performance and drive better returns on the products that we
put out in the field to our customers.
John Lammas - General Electric Company - VP, Gas Power Technology & CTO
Additive is a thing that is really changing the world for us. Performance. Our focus -- obviously, our machines are big. The current capability of the
machines is the smaller part, but that matches with what we need, the combustion parts, the hot gas parts is where this technology really pays off
for us and that's what gives us the efficiency.
Speed to market. We couldn't have done the tests we were doing every year without creating prototype parts with additives. It was essential to
that. Cost is also another play. We are seeing the possibility of taking costs out of components. We are working closely across the whole of GE on
improving the state of the art. Obviously, the machine is important. We know a lot about how to modify machines to get more performance;
working closely with the aviation business on that. We are working on alloys for higher temperature capability.
Additive is basically a welding process, so you can only print materials that you couldn't weld. Some of our high-temperature materials you can't
weld. So we are looking at different chemistries, different materials to get higher-temperature capability.
And then as Joe mentioned, you can consolidate parts. Instead of fabricating something out of two or three parts, you can print it as one. But the
next step is we've got cooling holes, small features. You can print those as well. So then that takes a whole step out of the manufacturing process,
which [gets] cost.
An example of how we've used these test engines and additive is on the right. That is a picture of a shroud. This is the flow [path] in the turbine,
one of the hottest components in the machine. We built prototype [car] parts. We tested them in the 7HA.02 in Greenville. We will introduce them
to the next version of the 7HA.02 in 2018. This alone takes 20% of the component cooling flowout of that component, which is $1.5 million in value
to the customer because of fuel burn, but it doesn't actually cost any more than the existing component.
So here is a great application of additive and how we have used the test stand to enable us to show that these components work, how they perform,
improve them and then employ them.
