From left: GE Additive’s Jake Brunsberg and Josh Mook.
Making a big a splash with a new product announcement is par for the course for any major player or newcomer exhibiting at a big industry event. Just look at the near 40 press conferences the TCT editorial team were invited to at last year’s Formnext, each vying for a 30 minute block of precious show floor time. Sometimes, it's good to go against the crowd.
Earlier that year metal additive manufacturing company, GE Additive unveiled its Spectra H electron beam melting system to a huge gathering of press and attendees at RAPID + TCT, complete with a big screen countdown and dramatic curtain drop, shortly followed by the commercial launch of its Concept Laser M Line Factory at the aforementioned Frankfurt event. In fact, you can signpost much of GE’s hardware progression with a number of major industry events following its acquisition of Concept Laser and Arcam in 2016. With that in mind, at this year’s RAPID + TCT in Detroit, I was surprised when the company invited me to find out more about their latest product in a low-key meeting spot away from the show floor with no theatrics or crowds in sight.
Short of any hardware to demonstrate and just a handful of subtly placed parts in the booth (though there were some highly publicised pieces from a recent MET Gala fashion collaboration and a flashy purple sports car with 3D printed wheels to pique the interest of attendees), you would be forgiven for thinking GE wanted to keep evidence of its new H2 Binder Jet system under wraps.
However, those parts belonged to Wabtec, a manufacturer for the rail and transport industries, which after investing in a beta version of the technology earlier this year, aims to use the H2 to support the production of up to 250 components for its product lines by 2025.
Wabtec isn’t the only company looking at GE’s latest technology for production. As part of a beta testing and partner programme, Fortune 500 manufacturer, Cummins, which already has two of its Concept Laser M2 systems installed, recently on boarded the H2 platform with a view use additive for high volume manufacturing.
“It was really important for us to find partners that have a history of being really innovative, pushing boundaries of technology in their respective industries. They are thinking, additively,” Jake Brunsberg, Product Line Leader for Binder Jet at GE Additive told TCT. “Seeing that good marriage of interests and innovation really paired well with the development of this technology because it really is a technology that unlocks the ability to do those additive innovative designs but do it at a price point and throughput that is tangible for automotive industrial applications.”
Sample Binder Jet parts from Wabtec.
Those H2 partnerships arrived 18 months after GE offered a sneak peek of an early proof of concept system, the H1, which GE engineers were challenged to develop in just 55 days. They did it in 47. Few details have been disclosed around the platform’s specifications but GE claims its Binder Jet process can print large parts at speeds up to 100 times faster than its laser-based systems. Last year a team of engineers at GE Global Research, GE Aviation and GE Additive used Binder Jet to build and test 30 different prototypes for a “football-size” jet engine component in under 12 weeks.
“Binder jet for us really kind of rounds out our metals portfolio for GE additive,” Brunsberg continued. “Laser technologies [have] really great fine feature resolution, can do really complex metallurgical changes and different things. Arcam does a tonne of really hard to weld alloys and unique applications. Binder jet is really our more mass production, high volume, low costs, it's a way to get solutions for industrial and automotive to the cost points that enable additive in those spaces.”
GE’s Binder Jet system takes on the same three-step format as any other binder and sinter process. You start with a print formed of metal powder and a binding agent, which is then depowdered and sintered to leave a solid metal part. Leveraging expertise from its AP&C materials business and acquired software capabilities from GeonX, refining that end-to-end process from file to finished part is critical, as Brunsberg explained:
“I think the knowledge on how to design for Binder Jet is incredibly important. Our AddWorks team is very involved in the front end from a design standpoint. A really important step to the binder jet process is having that distortion compensation and understanding of what happens to the rest of the process so you can design a part on the front end.
He continued: “I think there's a lot of importance around the machine architecture, your powder that you're using, the binder agent is incredibly critical to part material properties and the strength of those components. Then as you get out of that, the depowder system, the interaction from the Binder Jet machine to the depowder phase, and then into sintering, that full value stream goes back to how you pre-compensate the distortion so that entire process is absolutely critical to Binder Jet.”
GE Additive Binder Jet BETA H2 machine
GE Additive's beta H2 binder jetting platform.
GE believes Binder Jet's biggest application areas will be in the automotive sector where high throughput is required but it also identifies aerospace and medical as potential adoption areas, including its own internal business units. GE Aviation is already one of GE Additive’s biggest customers having recently installed an additional 17 A2X systems and 10 Spectra H systems and just last week became the first recipient of an M Line Factory system as its Additive Technology Center in Cincinnati. The machine flew from Germany on a Boeing 747-8 Freighter powered by GEnx-2B engine which are soon to incorporate a new set of additive brackets manufactured on the Concept Laser M2.
When asked what those customers are looking for with this Binder Jet platform, Brunsberg says it’s quite clear, they want “production technology.”
“The expectation is that we are developing this 100% the way an automotive floor would go to production,” he continued. “So, their uptime requirements, their machine yield, throughput of the machines, it needs to have a return on investment for these people and so I think they have high expectations … we want to build a technology that is a production solution long-term.”
A handful of the H2 beta Binder Jet systems are currently up and running at GE’s facility in Cincinnati where the company is working with its beta customers on several pilot lines. Those machines will ultimately be relocated to customer production facilities before the H2 becomes commercially available in early 2021. Until then, Brunsberg said we can expect to see more announcements from early stage customers as the company continues its beta programme and roadmap to mass production.
