There are 10 references to additive manufacturing in the transcript. Neither Arcam or Concept Laser are mentioned by name. There is one image of a Concept Laser machine in the 92 page PowerPoint pdf presentation.
Excerps from the transcript:
Joe Mastrangelo - General Electric Company - President & CEO, Gas Power Systems
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.
So with that I will wrap up. The left-hand side of the page is a graphic we have used every time that I have been in front of this group. I really think that what you saw the first time we presented this back at the end of 2015 was a vision. We are here today saying that the team is out actually selling and now executing on this. We will continue to focus on that $1.00 per kilowatt sold. ______________________________________________________________
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.
Product lifecycle management, maybe not the most glamorous of subjects, but it's a path we started on about seven or eight years ago. And what is it? It is basically management of all of the engineering data, be it parts, part lists, all the documentation. But what it has really enabled us to do is go model-based. We now don't produce the old drawings. For three years now in gas turbine, all we produce is the model. It's the single source of the truth. It has allowed us to eliminate about 35% of errors. A lot of those were just translations from models to drawings.
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