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[charlie T colton]

GE Team Secretly Printed a Helicopter Engine, Replacing 900 Parts with 16

This is a follow-up on an earlier post. The author highlights a portion of the GE Report that I did not. There's no direct mention in either article saying what role, if any, Arcam equipment had in the helicopter engine redesign and build. A picture of an Arcam A2x immediately followed the text that was omitted earlier.

By Peter Zelinski, Editor-in-Chief, Additive Manufacturing at additivemanufacturing.media - GE Team Secretly Printed a Helicopter Engine, Replacing 900 Parts with 16 - 3/31/2017


GE Additive’s Mohammad Ehteshami. Photo courtesy of GE Reports.

The GE Reports website occasionally publishes pieces that revisit the history of GE’s development work so far in additive manufacturing—the journey that has culminated in the LEAP fuel nozzle and other aircraft engine components now made through AM, as well as the purchase of AM equipment makers Arcam and Concept Laser. The latest example is a profile of Mohammad Ehteshami, head of the newly created GE Additive group, which describes the exploration into the potential of AM that occurred immediately after GE Aviation acquired 3D printing pioneer Morris Technologies in 2012. That exploration involved a team of engineers tasked with reinventing a helicopter engine, a team whose existence as a separate project group was disguised.

From the GE article:

They [Ehteshami and others from GE and Morris] moved a few machines to a drab building away from the main campus across Interstate 75 and started experimenting in secret with printing pieces of an old commercial helicopter engine. “We took six engineers and told them go and see what portion of the total engine they can print,” Ehteshami says. “We hid them from our financial management, because we didn’t want them to cut our budget.”

The clandestine effort paid off. Within 18 months, the team was able to print half of the machine, reducing 900 separate components to just 16, including one segment that previously had 300 different parts. The printed parts were also 40 percent lighter and 60 percent cheaper. “To make these parts the ordinary way, you typically need 10 to 15 suppliers, you have tolerances, you have nuts, bolts, welds and braces,” Ehteshami says. “All of that went away.”

The next section of the Report wasn't included but I think it's definitely worth posting.

By then it was 2014 and the team felt they had a result they could share with the big boss, GE Aviation President and CEO David Joyce. Like Ehteshami, he had spent decades as an engineer at the company before rising to the top spot. Thinking that Joyce would be their toughest critic, they showed him their work, but still asked him to keep it secret. “No way,” Joyce told them. “I want to tell Jeff (Immelt, GE chairman and CEO), I want to tell the board.”

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GE's original report had the picture below immediately following the text above:


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