GE Additive
GE Additive's Arcam EBM centre of excellence.
GE Additive's Arcam EBM centre of excellence.
Collaborative workspaces, hot desking systems, silver spherical monograms nailed to the walls, more than 1,000 global R&D brains to pick, room to grow by five times, the implementation of lean manufacturing and a resounding American voice carrying through the corridors as a press tour navigates the 15,000-square-foot space, ambles along a steel walkway and heads down to the squeaky-clean shop floor.
This is not the Arcam the additive manufacturing industry has grown accustomed to over the last 20 years. This, as the logo now tells us, is a GE Additive company.
Before, Arcam was headquartered inside a building three times as small, very much an ‘entrepreneurial start-up’ bringing to market a ‘unique but young’ technology from multiple offices throughout Gothenburg. Now, as a company operating under the GE banner, its activity-based tech and engineering offices are surrounded by research and development labs, with senior management on the floor above and product testing and customer training facilities on the floor below. Arcam, with the support of GE, is looking to propel itself to new heights.
“The commitment was to help this entrepreneurial company become world-class in terms of quality and supply for not just GE, but all industries that are now stepping into metal additive,” opens Jason Oliver, GE Additive CEO and the owner of those intonations reverberating through Arcam’s newly opened Centre of Excellence. “Part of building a great company like what we’re trying to do with GE Additive is having the right facilities and the right tools for our teams, our customers, our suppliers to come and collaborate together. We’ve put 18 million [Euros] into this facility alone and we don’t even own it; we’re leasing this over the next 10 years.”
GE’s acquisition of Arcam in late 2016, along with the takeover of Concept Laser, marked the foundation of the conglomerate’s Additive business unit. It followed the acquisition of Avio’s aviation business in 2013, who had for four years been a user of Arcam’s Electron Beam Melting (EBM) 3D printing technology and for even longer been a user of a material called titanium aluminide, a material that GE had originally patented. In January of 2020, this trio enjoyed a landmark moment: Boeing successfully flying two GE9X engines on its 777X aircraft, each of which featured around 250 titanium aluminide turbine blades printed with EBM technology by Avio Aero.
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GE Additive
Avio Aero turbine blade made on GE Additive Arcam EBM machine.
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Left, the turbine blade as it comes out of the Spectra H system and right, the finished component after machining.
One of those blades is being swung repeatedly in the hand of Arcam’s General Manager Karl Lindblom to prove how light the component is. A 30% reduction in the weight of each of the GE9X turbine blades is contributing to a 10% increase in fuel efficiency compared with the GE90 engine that came before it, while the GE Additive team is keen to point out these critical and moving parts can’t be made any other way.
The GE9X is GE Aviation’s biggest ever commercial aircraft engine, and while turbine blades have previously been made with investment casting, the size of these components mean they typically crack because of the thermal gradients running through the blades. With EBM, the surrounding temperature inside the machine is 1,000°C, with the electron beam raising the temperature slightly to around 1,200°C to melt the material, which means smaller thermal gradients are generated and the component experiences less residual stress.
Typically, ten of these components are printed at any one time in the Spectra H, with the build taking around 100 hours and machining being carried out afterwards. Arcam’s VP of Engineering Annika Ölme and VP of Technology Isak Elfström believe last month’s test flight to be a ‘big moment’ for the company, Lindblom agreed it was a landmark, and Oliver would tell you enabling applications like this are what the new facility in Gothenburg is all about.
“Having a new facility gives you a chance to change and look at processes to continuously improve; it’s about things like efficiency and quality,” Oliver continues. “This allows us to provide top quality to our customers, lower costs and makes us a world-class company.”
The GE9X turbine blades showcased on the left of a corridor, beyond the turnstile that separates the lobby from the rest of the facility, is evidence of this ambition. It lives next door to a cabinet that seeks to display a fundamental benefit of additive versus conventional manufacturing means. Another example of its offering to customers, on the bottom shelf is a machined bracket accompanied by the strips of material waste, and on the top shelf, a printed version using 95% less powder.
“Every big company has a CO2 target,” opines Lindblom, highlighting why these returns are attractive for customers before Oliver adds: “If you take even more complex parts like the ones we’re seeing in aviation – GE Aviation has done redesigns and what would have been 300 parts is now down to one – given the amount of movement these individual parts from different companies and different facilities around the world [would have required], GE Aviation is now running Arcam machines and [Concept] Laser machines 100 metres over to where they put in the engine. That’s that movement out of your supply chain; it completely goes away and that’s massive.”
Arcam’s core offering to market currently stands at five additive manufacturing platforms: Spectra L, Spectra H, A2X, Q20plus and Q10plus. The Q10 machine is suitable for medical applications, the Q20 for aerospace parts, the A2X is presented as a materials and process development system, while the Spectra series is designed to enable larger sizes and volumes of aerospace components. These machines are lined up downstairs in the ‘dirty labs’ where customers, service engineers and new hires undergo practical training across a five-day period. Sessions are held up to 45 times a year and include tutorials on post-processing, powder handling and other ancillary steps.
Arcam under GE Additive
Sep 2016: GE announces Arcam acquisition plan, deal done by December
Sep 2017: Arcam metal powder subsidiary AP&C opens new AM plant
Jan 2018: GE delists Arcam from Nasdaq stock exchange
Apr 2018: Spectra H machine unveiled at RAPID + TCT
Aug 2019: New Gothenburg facility opened
Nov 2019: Spectra L platform launches at Formnext
Jan 2020: Boeing completes successful flight tests of two GE9X engines
On the same level of the facility are a host of materials development and research labs, which users of EBM can access whenever they want. There is also an additive test centre operated by 13 employees to test new features and functionalities to support the engineering and technology teams on the floor above.
Here, there are cleaner labs for software and electronics personnel surrounding a shared workspace where the electron beam unit team is deep in conservation with four around two workstations, while also hard at work are the software, system and quality teams, plus the staff responsible for developing the PRS 30, Arcam’s automated powder removal system launched at Formnext. Oliver says to expect more in the way of automation capabilities launched by GE Additive in the coming months and years, while Ölme highlights the introduction of these solutions will be key for users to scale to serial production with EBM. It is also noted that synergy with the wider GE Additive business could be on the cards in developing and adding functionality to products like the PRS 30: “We’re all moving powder after the build; that’s an area where we obviously can learn from each other. That’s the strength of being part of something bigger.”
Being bigger, Ölme went on to say, has also allowed Arcam to start looking beyond aerospace and medical, the two vertical markets it has maintained a focus on for more than a decade. Its launch of a pure copper material at Formnext is the first product to be unveiled as horizons are broadened; though not yet commercially available, the material opens Arcam up to the automotive market. Ölme and Elfström say the pure copper powder is still ‘a research material’, which proves it works on EBM technology, but now must go through a ‘development’ phase, where Arcam shares it with a select few customers, before becoming a ‘production’ material where it will be made available as an 'off the shelf' product.
Sample parts produced with EBM in pure copper material.
Sample parts produced with EBM in pure copper material.
The foundations for these developments are put in place by the 100 or so people managed by Ölme and Elfström, who, since the move, are enjoying a shared workspace. Up one floor, where the service staff, admin personnel and top management preside, a hotdesking system is in place. It’s part of a drive to enable cross-functional cooperation, taking advantage of having every department within the same premises. At one time, Isak’s R&D team was outsourced, while there were other labs dotted around Gothenburg. With the support of GE, the company has gone to great lengths to fit everyone all under one roof.
GE’s involvement has other benefits for the tech and engineering departments too. Where before, Isak had just 20 minds being deployed on various projects, he can now also lean on the expertise of an international R&D team. While the company has always worked with universities and educational intuitions, like North Carolina State where the first EBM machine was sold or Oak Ridge National Labs, the access to GE experts was something of a gift for Elfström.
“We are collaborating a lot with the larger GE network. The global research [division], which is based in New York, is where I spend a lot of my time. We have a lot of great knowledge and capabilities that are very difficult to access for a really small company. Becoming a part of GE, it was like a Christmas present for me,” he says.
“All of a sudden Isak has access to 1,500 new friends also working with the latest technology and that will drive our technology development heavily,” Lindblom adds. “Now, we have a huge toolbox and a huge bank of unique know-how and experience that we can tap into within GE and all the different factories around the world.”
GE’s takeover of Arcam in 2016 is very much seen as a turning point within these walls. Ölme describes it as ‘a defining moment’, while Elfström’s past uttering of the words, ‘it’s very nice to have an industrial owner’, are recounted several times before, during and after the tour. The technology and engineering duo describe the acquisition as soft, ‘there was no team flying in with black suits,’ Elfström jokes, while Ölme likens the purchases of Arcam and Concept Laser to a ‘joint venture’ because there was ‘no existing business unit to integrate us into.’
"Trust your employees and listen to them. Don't sit in your office, go down on the shop floor and learn from your employees to come to the right solution."
The way the move was actioned in the first instance, and the way things have developed since (albeit gradually), has been of great comfort to the pair’s teams, who also note a significant difference in their position within the additive market.
“It’s especially important for us to know we have an owner that’s in it for the long haul; it’s important to have that stability,” Ölme explains. “We are now looked upon as a more stable player in the additive industry. That’s harder for us to portray if we are a smaller Swedish company with our own technology. Now, we are a part of a global player.”
That global player has recommended its additive subsidiaries consolidate its facilities, encourage internal collaboration and streamline processes. With the opening of Concept Laser’s new Lichtenfels site in autumn 2019, the DMLS brand brought all of its different functionalities from 26 buildings into one. GE has done the same with Arcam. In Gothenburg, the company has also advised on the implementation of lean manufacturing, which is a directive that is being driven from the very top by GE CEO Larry Culp.
Arcam shop floor model
1:100 scale model of the Arcam assembly and production plant. Logistics is located at the back of the facility; pre-assembly and mechanical assembly on the right; electrical cabinet assembly in the centre; and machine calibration & factory acceptance testing on the left.
It is a move that has seen Arcam bring safety, quality, turnaround time and costs into its direct focus. GE advised on the best ventilation system to install, on the most ideal fire extinguishing system and held a workshop to detail how to layout production and logistics. Harnessing lean has also opened up a regular dialogue between factory workers and senior leadership; meetings are held in an open space on the shop floor three times a week for up to an hour at a time. And not just because Lindblom no longer has a desk to sit at, as he jests.
“Trust your employees and listen to your employees or ‘go to Gemba’ as it’s called. Don’t sit in your office, go down on the shop floor. Look what’s happening there and learn from your employees to come to the right solution,” Lindblom emphasises. “’We have a problem in this, we had an incident there, we need to work on this problem.’ And that’s where we as a management team are coming together, because we are sitting on all the resources, to say ‘okay, how can we help you? Do you need more manpower in that area? Okay, you’ve got five people here you can use for that.’ That’s how we try to help the organisation so that small problems don’t become big problems. We think that is an important vehicle for us to become a true industrial player in the additive field.”
This, Arcam hopes, is the means to the end that sees the company expand its installation of EBM technology as its user base scales. When GE Additive first emerged in 2016, it did so with big ambitions. Mohammad Ehteshami, Oliver’s predecessor, told TCT of its aim to manufacture 10,000 machines in ten years, with an extra 1,000 for GE’s internal consumption.
GE Additive
AVio Aero Arcam
GE Additive Arcam EBM machines at Avio Aero.
Those figures will, of course, have been spread out across Arcam, Concept Laser and GE Additive’s binder jetting endeavours, but will still require a big effort from the Gothenburg-based team. Lindblom takes a moment to ponder the numbers as they are put to him, perhaps thinking back to Oliver’s approximations re the medical implant sector earlier in the day.
Presenting a near-net-shape hip cup application that facilitates bone in-growth and can be implanted without glue, Oliver referenced Geoffrey Moore's 'Crossing the Chasm' and observed that with capabilities like that, “you’ll see a big spike once we get past the early adopter stage - the first 5-7% - because there are a handful of companies and doctors out there that say, ‘hey, this works,’ and everyone jumps on board. That’s about what’s happening right now; everybody wants to get into additive implants.”
If that wasn’t the reason for Lindblom’s pause, maybe it was the GE9X turbine blade. Boeing is expecting to deliver the first of 340 777X aircraft orders in 2021, with each plane requiring two GE9X engines, and each engine equipped with around 250 blades. It takes 100 hours to build ten blades, and while the Avio Aero business installed ten Spectra H platforms last year, it’s possible the company would need to up their printing capacity to handle the production of so many components.
“It takes a certain amount of time before it comes through the pipeline, of course,” Lindblom assesses, “but yes, this means a lot of business for us going forward. In the past, it was zero additive content [in a GE Aviation aircraft engine]. Now, it’s 300 parts that are additive. As they ramp up, maybe 1,000 machines internally are possible within a couple of years. 10,000 machines? Maybe. If an industry is growing with 15% per year, you’re doubling your business in five years, why not?
“It’s difficult to say but I think it at least shows the direction we are heading. It’s going to be a volume business in ten years, for sure.”
