Harcoreta made this incredible 3d printed jet engine for RC applications modeled on GE GEnx-1B. It is very detailed Electric Ducted Fan (EDF) motor with NTM 1400kv 35mm brushless motor located inside the core which is cooled by a small impeller. It even features working thrust reversal system. It was printed on Reprap Prusa I3 at 0.1mm layer height and then smoothed by using an acrylic thinner.
The files of it are not available ... yet
Details of thrust reversal mechanism:
Technical specifications of the model motor:
100mm diameter 18 blade main fan scale looking. 24 outlet guide vanes.
34 mm diamenter 18 blade internal turbine, installed on the back shaft of the motor, It's designed only for cooling the motor. Over this section there are a sequence of stator vanes and supports to optimize the airflow. This internal airflow could produce thrust but in any case it'll be a few grams.
Scale looking nacelle, the major differences are the simplified engine pylon and the minor reduction on the exhaust area, about 95% fsa
Thrust reverser, complete system with translating cowl, blocker doors and cascades. The most complicated parts that must work.
NTM 1400kv 35mm motor. Thrust target > 0.5Kg with 3S or 4S maximum.
New advancement from GE where they managed to 3D print fully functional small metal jet engine. It runs up to 33,000 RPM. Soon someone will make open source version of it. That would have some interesting implications.
CloudDDM is a company that operates like most 3D printing services where you can order parts through a web interface, but they're able to produce any part at high volumes and speed. They've recently opened a 3D printing factory inside UPS international hub in Louisville USA with one hundred 3D printers and plans to increase to a thousand. The machines run 24/7 and all the logistics are handled by UPS. They print in several materials like: ABS, Polycarbonate (PC), Polycarbonate-ABS (PC-ABS) and ULTEM 1010 with several color options.
CloudDDM 3D printers. DDM stands for "Direct Digital Manufacturing". Image source: CNN
Now the truly amazing (or frightening) thing about this factory is that it is highly automatized and operated by only THREE WORKERS! 3 people! 3! One per eight hour shift! Is this a new trend? Factories without ANY workers?
Lots of 3d printers and robots producing and only a few people designing and carrying furniture. They look out of place and almost like decoration. I'll write about future of design work in future post about this topic ... but don't think machines can not design stuff also ...
Materialise has a 3D printing "factory" facilities with what looks like more people working:
But this is not a pure "factory" but more diverse design and production center with design, product development and engineering personnel. Another point is that they probably displace many "traditional" workers as they use cutting edge technology and logistics. Maybe even several orders of magnitude more then they employ. If you look closely you will find that even some of the workplaces showed in this video could be automated now or replaced by machines in couple of years.
Are we seeing a start of 3D printing factories replacing industrial workers? In the '90ties during the first dot-com bubble people predicted that the postal services will disappear because of email communication but they were wrong since they took over the much increased package shipments due to rise of e-commerce. Could this happen again with increased volume of 3D printed products? Probably not.
Why?
Because the whole transport logistic sector is getting automatized! Deimler just presented their autonomous truck and the state of Nevada is supporting it with new autonomous vehicle legislation. Even the company said it will take some 10 years to have fully autonomous trucks on the roads with major regulatory obstacles but they are moving in that direction with most of the other tech companies like Tesla and Google. Do keep in mind that "truck driver" is most common profession in the USA with more than 9 million employed in the trucking industry or 1 in every 13 employed Americans.
Is this onset of technological unemployment unfolding in real life?Technological unemployment (or desourcing) is defined as a process of unemployment being caused mainly by technological advances. It is a controversial theory that has yet to be confirmed or disproved.
In 2014 Pew Research surveyed 1,896 technology professionals and economists and found a split in opinions: 48 percent of them believed that new technologies would displace more jobs than they would create by the year 2025, while 52 percent maintained that they would not. The implications of it being a reality would have HUGE societal impact on a global scale. What jobs are future proof?
Future will be interesting. Stay smart and think about all the possible scenarios!
As I live in a country with very high unemployment I have very personal interest in this topic and I think it is very important to investigate it and stay informed about it.
Do you think your job could be done by a machine or software? Share your opinions in comment section
Update (07.02.2016.):
Siemens opened first European 3d printing factory in Sweden. The €21.4 million facility, located in Siemen’s industrial plant in Finspång, Sweden will have 20 employees and multiple industrial grade metal 3d printers. The factory will produce prototypes, end-product parts and replacement parts for repair focused on gas turbines. Thorbjorn Fors, global business director for Distributed Generation at Siemens, said of the facility:
“With this investment, we can develop new and improved components and repairs, for example burner tips to serve our industrial gas turbine SGT-800, significantly faster. Using this innovative approach, we will shorten repair times from months to weeks. It is an important step in our ability to respond to the needs of our customers.”
As we see there are more 3d printing factories being build with very small number of workers. This is also a start of the change in the Europe.
Siemens 3d printing factory in Sweden. Looks very clean. And empty of people.
Update (15.04.2016.):
There are more 3D printing factories and production / prototyping centers being opened all over the world:
Airbus opened one in the Ludwig Bolköw Campus near Munich.
From the source:
The Aerospace Factory, as the new 3D printing center at the facility is being called, will be based out of the Ludwig Bolköw Campus, an industry and university collaborative venture located on-site. The location will be used to research the 3D printing of endparts for use in aerospace through work performed by a number of important players including: Airbus Safran Launchers; metal 3D printer manufacturer EOS; engine maker MTU Aero Engines; the Technical University of Munich and its Institute for Machine Tools and Industrial Management; Airbus Group Innovations; the Fraunhofer Development Center for X-ray Technology (EZRT); Industrieanlagen-Betriebsgesellschaft mbH (IABG); Airbus subsidiary APWorks; virtual prototyping firm the ESI Group; and the Airbus Endowed Chair for Integrative Simulation and Engineering of Materials and Processes (ISEMP) of the University of Bremen.
GE opened 200 M USD advanced manufacturing centre in Pune, India.
From the source:
In 2015, GE unveiled its $200 million, Multi-Modal advanced manufacturing facility in Chakan, Pune, part of the western Indian state of Maharashtra. Dubbed a “brilliant factory” by its creators, the facility was established to produce jet engine parts, locomotive components, wind turbines, and a host of other additively and traditionally manufactured components for a number of GE companies. The facility now employs around 1,500 workers, responsible for operating 3D printers and other machinery. "The idea is to service a multitude of businesses—from oil and gas, to aviation, transportation, and distributed power—all under the same roof," said GE's Amit Kumar, overseer of the Multi-Modal facility, via TechRepublic.
The Multi-Modal facility provides GE with several advantages. By bringing a number of interconnected operations under one roof, the company will allegedly save up to ten times as much money than if it had established individual facilities for separate business lines. The facility is also helping to bring plastic and metal additive manufacturing technology to its India operations, an advancement which offers the company huge flexibility and cost-saving potential.
Eventually, the Pune facility will produce critical end-use components such as the jet engine fuel nozzle, but it will first service a more urgent need: 3D printing replacement parts for broken machinery—parts that would otherwise have to be made in bulk and stored, or sourced from an external supplier. Replacement parts, especially for older appliances, can be incredibly difficult to source when those appliances are discontinued or simply made in small quantities. 3D printing these replacement parts is much faster than producing them using traditional manufacturing techniques, with previous timescales of three to five months reduced to around one week when additive manufacturing is implemented
GE Oil & Gas is opening new 3D printing factory line with advanced robotics in Talamona, Italy. It is investing some 10 million USD in new production lines to 3D print burners for gas turbine combustion chambers and other advanced components such as nozzles. These new advanced manufacturing lines establishes this site as a center of excellence for the oil and gas industry. It also used advanced production software to manage the factory.
“The use of automated production and new techniques like additive manufacturing allow us to develop parts and products more efficiently, precisely and cost-effectively, accelerating the speed at which we can bring product to market,” said Davide Marrani, general manager for manufacturing for GE Oil & Gas’ Turbomachinery Solutions business line.
“The opportunities for the application of additive manufacturing and 3D printing in the oil and gas industry are only just starting to be explored, and it will require an ongoing rethink of component design and production approach,” said Massimiliano Cecconi, GE Oil & Gas Materials & Manufacturing Technologies Executive.
As factories as growing so is the software ecosystem that connects them B2B and B2C. Fast Radius has developed "virtual inventory" software for their 3d printing factory. It enables companies to deliver parts "on demand" and "just in time". Rick Smith from Fast Radius said:
“On average, the rule of thumb for the cost of holding physical inventory is about 25 percent the cost of the part per year,” he explained. “There is a significant cost in terms of cost of capital, warehousing space, security and damage. The other major problem with physical inventory is that you’ve got to produce in large volumes to get the unit costs low. This works great when you’re producing iPhones and you know you’re going to sell 10 million of them. But, when all of a sudden you’ve got an essential part and you know you’re only going to need 15 of them per year—maybe it’s a critical part to a machine in a manufacturing operation that doesn’t break very often, but is extremely important when it does break—then it doesn’t make sense to go through the setup and all of the costs related to doing a larger-scale production.”
The centralized manufacturing model of the 20th century may not be done away with soon, but the shift is already under way. To introduce its 3D printing services to potential OEMs, Fast Radius has partnered with about a dozen companies that are looking to make the shift to a virtual inventory. “To start,” Smith explained, “the companies that we’re working with are identifying 1,000 or 1,500 parts that are excellent candidates for on demand production. This may be a small percentage of their overall inventory, but as costs drop precipitously and quality continues to rise over time, these companies know that a larger and larger percentage of physical inventory will be moved to a virtual inventory model.”
GE has many advanced 3d printing projects, this is a new one. Direct Write technology will 3d print sensors and components to enable machines to form internet-of-things or industrial internet.
From the source:
If you feel that the world has become a buzzing beehive of connectivity, wait a few years. A recent report from CISCO estimates that only a small fraction of the devices that could be talking to each other - 10 billion out of 1.5 trillion, or just 0.6 percent - are actually connected. CISCO estimates that the number will jump to 50 billion by 2020, potentially transforming the way we live and the global economy. Many of the connected “things” will be intelligent machines equipped with myriads of tiny sensors harvesting data and sending it over to the cloud for processing. Scientists at GE Global Research are now experimenting with a technology that could speed up the transition to link up machines and put sensors where they've never been before.
The technology, called Direct Write, allows machine designers to use special “inks” to print miniature sensors directly inside jet engines, gas turbines and other hot, harsh and hard to reach places. “We can use it to print sensors on 3D surfaces,” says James Yang, engineer at GE Global Research who is leading the project. “One day they could be anywhere.” Yang and his team are using a computer-controlled syringe filled with a special ink to print the sensors (see video below). One ink type uses a conductive mix of fine silver, copper, platinum and other metal particles. A different set of printing liquids resist electricity and use metal oxides instead of pure metals. Yang says that this is handy since “changes in resistivity can give us information about changes in the part.”
The Direct Write technology emerged in the 1990s when DARPA, the Defense Department’s research agency, was seeking a way to print electrical circuits on flexible surfaces. The method is currently being used by the electronics industry to manufacture cellphone antennas. Yang and his team are using Direct Write to print 3D sensors that can withstand 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit and handle high mechanical forces. The sensors could help engineers better understand what happens inside machines and come up with better designs. They could also allow customers to harvest data they could not access before, optimize machine performance and spot problems before they get out of hand.
GE is intensively researching and using various forms of 3d printing. This is new approach where they use "cold spray" technology to spray metal particle paint layers on metal part and form a shape. Since it can be applied on metal surfaces, it can be used to repair a part as well as make a new one. This could result in huge savings in complex metal parts repair or maintenance.
From GE site:
Spray technologies are particularly attractive for the production of large structures, which are challenging for today’s powder-bed additive manufacturing processes due to equipment size limitations.
The cold spray technique has the potential to scale up to build larger parts, with the only limitation being the size of the area over which metal powders can be applied. Cold spray—also known as 3D painting—demonstrates a unique marriage of materials, process, and product function which can, in the immediate future, transform repair processes for industrial and aircraft components such as rotors, blades, shafts, propellers, and gear boxes.
Since cold spray does not require heat, like common repair processes such as welding, it allows a repaired part to be restored close to its original condition. In GE’s Oil and Gas business, GE researchers are exploring cold spray as an alternate way to repair or coat parts involved in oil and gas drilling and turbo machinery. Cold spray’s future benefits include extended product lifespan and reduced manufacturing time and material costs, all of which translate into significant customer benefits.
here is the video about Cold Spray additive manufacturing technology layering process in super slow motion:
From video description:
See the Slow Mo Guys film GE researchers demonstrate a process called "cold spray", in which metal powders are sprayed at high velocities to build a part or add material to repair an existing part. GE researchers are exploring this 3D painting technology as an alternate way to repair or coat parts involved in oil and gas drilling and turbo machinery. To see the process on film, the Slow Mo Guys spray copper particles 10 times bigger than normally used for this process.
Over the last decade, engineers at GE Aviation have been experimenting with a new way to make jet engine parts. Rather than cutting, milling and drilling engine components, they weld together thin layers of powdered metal with a 200-watt laser and build parts from the ground up. Now, other businesses are supersizing 3D printing and pushing the technology into new areas. GE Power and Water recently acquired a laser printer that is five times as powerful as the GE Aviation machine and can work with two lasers at the same time. “We are learning how to use this technology,” says Jon Schaeffer, senior manager for materials and processing engineering for Power and Water. “We’ve got to spread the word and change the design paradigm that metallurgists, designers and manufacturing teams have had for a long time.” Schaeffer says that the 3D printer will help speed up innovation and test new ideas and designs faster. “We’ve been able to embed new technologies into our components without the messy manufacturing steps normally required,” he says. “We are cutting out months in the development cycle with this technology.” The printer’s build area is almost a cubic foot, large enough to print gas turbine parts. “The biggest thing that was holding us back was the size of the chamber,” Schaeffer says. “But the chamber volume has grown 50 times over the last five years. It’s almost like Moore’s law for 3D printing.” Schaeffer, who started at GE two decades ago in GE Aviation, points to his former colleagues as a model for making advanced technologies work. GE Aviation is already printing nozzles for the next-generation LEAP jet engine. Each nozzle used to made from 18 parts welded together. It is now grown as a single piece that is 25 percent lighter than its predecessor. David Joyce, president and CEO of GE Aviation, says that the technology liberated his business from the limitations of machining. “It gives the designer a whole different palette of colors to paint with, and truly on a whole new canvas,” Joyce says. Engineers at Power and Water have already used their new machine to design and print a cooling shroud for GE’s latest gas turbine. “There was a time when we could not test new designs and technologies in new parts because we were not able to make them,” Schaeffer says. “3D printing is pointing engineers in the right direction to see if they’ve got a successful concept. It’s really quite exciting.”
