3D Printing - Production Applications

2019

Additive Manufacturing is growing in Airplane manufacturing

GE, which spent nearly $1 billion to acquire two 3D printer businesses in 2016, is taking a bottom-up approach and looks at the technology as a creative medium that can help it improve the design of jet engines. Honeywell is content to buy 3D printers from third parties including GE and for now sees this technology as a tool that it can embed in its supply chain to increase efficiency. United Technologies is taking a science-heavy tack.

Honeywell has a football-field sized complex filled with 3D printing machines at its aerospace headquarters in Phoenix, Arizona.

So far, Honeywell has obtained approval for 18 parts including an engine surge duct and it expects to have an additional 14 cleared by the end of the month. All in, the company thinks it can get the FAA’s blessing to swap printers for traditional manufacturing processes on 250 aerospace parts by the end of this year. Honeywell is using 3D-printing technology as a working-capital improvement program.

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.

As for United Technologies, it pledged $75 million in 2017 to establish an additive manufacturing center near its Connecticut headquarters. It now has “a few parts” certified by U.S. and European aviation regulators and is targeting more than 100 by 2021
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-04-12/3d-printing-is-set-to-revolutionize-aviation-for-ge-honeywell

2 December 2018

http://mepca-engineering.com/december-2018/

Page 14 3DPrintUK

The Additive Advantage - Low Price - 20p

3D printing is increasingly being used to print finished products.
3DPrintUk can print products at a price as low as 20p per unit. It is not costly anymore.


26 April 2016
What is viable and what is not with 3D printed enclosures
http://www.newelectronics.co.uk/electronics-technology/what-is-viable-and-what-is-not-with-3d-printed-enclosures/118486/




9 January 2015

General Electric - Auburn, Alabama Plant - Nozzle Production by 3D Printing

First Production Application of 3D Printing by GE

When it opens in 2015, the General Electric Auburn plant will be producing fuel nozzles for the next-generation LEAP jet engine using 3D Printing.


Each engine will have nearly twenty 3D-printed fuel nozzles.The nozzles are five times more durable than the previous model. 3D printing allowed engineers to design them as one part rather than 20 individual parts, reducing the number of brazes and welds that would have been necessary using traditional methods.

http://www.gereports.com/post/91763815095/worlds-first-plant-to-print-jet-engine-nozzles-in





Updated on 22 September 2019,  2 December 2018,
First published on 9 January 2015