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Your Next Flight Is Brought to You by 3D Printing

We've seen how far this technology has advanced from the early days but we also forget that we are still in the true infancy of it's adoption in manufacturing worldwide.

At the washingtonpost.com - Your Next Flight Is Brought to You by 3D Printing - Brooke Sutherland - Bloomberg April 12 , 2019

From the middle of the article:

GE Aviation currently has four 3D-printed discrete parts certified by the FAA, and the expected approval of its GE9X and Catalyst engines over the next two years will give it about 20 more. But looking at the numbers alone understates the scale of GE’s ambitions. Of the more than 80 additional parts in GE Aviation’s additive pipeline, roughly 90 percent are based on new designs, meaning these parts don’t currently exist in that form in the marketplace, Eric Gatlin, the general manager for the unit’s additive integrated product team, said in an interview. The company is trying to literally reinvent the wheel, or in this case, the engine.(2) It’s pitching its Catalyst turboprop engine as the first that was designed from the start to be crafted with the help of additive manufacturing. For engineers trained on traditional casting and welding processes, that requires a whole new thought process.

Using traditional methods, a heat exchanger on the Catalyst required some 300 components, hand assembly and blind welding; now it can be printed as a single part. That’s where GE’s decision to acquire the actual makers of 3D printers is paying off. These deals weren’t cheap, but they also weren’t dumb. Instead of being forced to wait months for third-party printer makers to add features, the GE Aviation team can give feedback and get tweaks made within hours. GE’s doing something right because the weight and fuel burn advantages from the Catalyst’s 3D printed parts were one factor that it says helped it win a contract for Textron Inc.’s Cessna Denali and break into a cross-section of the business and general aviation market that has historically been dominated by United Technologies’ Pratt & Whitney.



Footnote (2) from the section above:

(2) The company almost didn’t pursue printing one of its FAA certified parts – a power-door operating bracket on the GEnx engine – because it would have been a more straightforward substitution and the additive team thought it was too simple; an engineer campaigned for the weight reduction benefits and the opportunity to circumvent a supplier that was charging too much.