Confirmation as to how seriously some companies are taking additive manufacturing, popularly known as 3D printing, came when GE Aviation bought a privately owned company called Morris Technologies. Morris Technologies has invested heavily in 3D printing equipment and will be printing bits for a new range of jet engines. Morris Technologies uses a number of 3D printing machines, all of which work by using a digital description of an object to build it in physical form, layer by layer.
One of the attractions of printing parts is that it saves material. Instead of machining components from solid billets of metal, in which much of it may be cut away, only the material that is needed to shape the part is used. Printed parts can also be made lighter than forged parts, which promises fuel savings.
Many manufacturers already use 3D printing to make prototypes of parts, because it is cheaper and more flexible than tooling up to produce just one or two items. But the technology is now good enough for it to be used to make production items too.
Among the components that Morris Technologies plans to print will be some used in the LEAP jet engine, which is being developed by CFM International, a joint venture between GE Aviation and Snecma of France. The LEAP engine is scheduled to enter service in the next few years on a number of short-haul airliners. More than 4,000 engines have already been ordered.
Additive manufacturing
Print me a jet engine
Schumpeter
Business and management
The Economist
http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2012/11/additive-manufacturing
Confirmation as to how seriously some companies are taking additive manufacturing, popularly known as 3D printing, came on November 20th when GE Aviation, part of the world’s biggest manufacturing group, bought a privately owned company called Morris Technologies. This is a small precision-engineering firm employing 130 people in suburban Cincinnati, Ohio. Morris Technologies has invested heavily in 3D printing equipment and will be printing bits for a new range of jet engines.Morris Technologies uses a number of 3D printing machines, all of which work by using a digital description of an object to build it in physical form, layer by layer. Among the 3D printing technologies used by Morris Technologies is laser sintering. This involves spreading a thin layer of metallic powder onto a build platform and then fusing the material with a laser beam. The process is repeated until an object emerges. Laser sintering is capable of producing all kinds of metal parts, including components made from aerospace-grade titanium.
One of the attractions of printing parts is that it saves material. Instead of machining components from solid billets of metal, in which much of it may be cut away, only the material that is needed to shape the part is used. Printed parts can also be made lighter than forged parts, which promises fuel savings.
Many manufacturers already use 3D printing to make prototypes of parts, because it is cheaper and more flexible than tooling up to produce just one or two items. But the technology is now good enough for it to be used to make production items too.
Among the components that Morris Technologies plans to print will be some used in the LEAP jet engine (pictured), which is being developed by CFM International, a joint venture between GE Aviation and Snecma of France. The LEAP engine is scheduled to enter service in the next few years on a number of short-haul airliners. More than 4,000 engines have already been ordered.
GE is buying Morris Technologies (which includes a sister company, Rapid Quality Manufacturing) for an undisclosed sum. GE sees the purchase as an investment in an important new manufacturing technology. “Our ability to develop state of the art manufacturing processes for emerging materials and complex design geometry is critical to our future,” said Colleen Athans, general manager of GE Aviation’s supply-chain operations.
Some people think additive manufacturing will overturn many of the economics of production because it pays no heed to unit labour costs or traditional economies of scale. Designs can be quickly changed, so the technology enables flexible production and mass customisation.
The GE deal is further evidence for those who believe that product innovation will increasingly go hand-in-hand with manufacturing innovation. So proximity of production and R&D will matter more. With GE Aviation based just outside Cincinnati, the firms are almost neighbours.
“Schumpeter” Column
In September 2009, the Economist launched a column about business, innovation and entrepreneurship in honor of Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950), the brilliant Austrian economist who, argued that innovation is at the heart of economic progress. It gives new businesses a chance to replace old ones, but it also dooms those new businesses to fail unless they can keep on innovating (or find a powerful government patron). In his most famous phrase he likened capitalism to a “perennial gale of creative destruction”. For Schumpeter the people who kept this gale blowing were entrepreneurs. He was responsible for popularising the word itself, and for identifying the entrepreneur’s central function: of moving resources, however painfully, to areas where they can be used more productively. But he also recognised that big businesses can be as innovative as small ones, and that entrepreneurs can arise from middle management as well as college dorm-rooms.
Schumpeter’s work on the dynamism of high-tech markets (later married with Clayton Christensen‘s concept of “disruptive innovation“) is one of the most persistent themes across cyber-libertarian thinking of all stripes on a wide variety of issues. You can listen to an interview with the new column’s author on the Economist podcast here (MP3). One important point the author makes is that Schumpeter realized that celebrating capitalism did not preclude criticizing individual capitalists when justified and vice versa—something all too often forgotten today.
Morris Technologies
http://www.morristech.com/