Florence, Talamone, Celle, Aberdeen, Houston, Kariwa and Dhahran.
These are the seven locations in which Baker Hughes has deployed additive manufacturing centres of excellence. Just seven years ago, it had none.
While 2020 has seen the company harness its additive capability to address medical device and PPE shortages as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, 2019 was a year of significance, for it qualified as many end-use additively manufactured components as the previous five combined. Baker Hughes now has a collection of more than 450 qualified parts which, altogether, have been additively manufactured over 25,000 times.
“Without question,” Dr. Mikhail Gladkikh, the company’s Global Technology and Operations Leader for the Additive Services Growth Venture, says, “we are the leader in the area for oil and gas on functional additive manufacturing applications.”
That industry leadership, exhibited through its myriad downhole and turbo machinery applications, stems from those seven facilities. Each houses teams of additive manufacturing specialists and invites engineers from the company’s various product lines to share knowledge, technology and insights, and ultimately leverage additive to solve problems across the business.
Gladkikh describes the centres as ‘catalysts for additive implementation.’ In Aberdeen, the additive team is focused on oil field equipment applications, while the two centres in Italy primarily serve Baker Hughes’ turbo engine endeavours. Around 50% of the effort exerted in Houston is on the additive manufacture of parts, with a focus also being placed on process and materials development, which occur hand in hand.
Paolo Appendino
Baker Hughes AM
The Dhahran facility is primarily an R&D centre and houses Saudi Arabia’s first industrial metal additive manufacturing system, installed last year. One application to come out of this facility is a Rock Lock backup ring, which was redesigned for an additive process to permit a packer expansion range, meaning the part can now run operations in a wider range of well bore sizes. The design of this part would not be possible with traditional technologies.
Back in 2013, Baker Hughes’ first printed component was a core holding barrel for downhole applications, with fuel nozzles for turbo machinery being additively manufactured around the same time. Over the years, the application of 3D printing has expanded right across the business; rapid prototyping and jigs and fixtures made up most of the early use cases, but end-use parts materialised in gas turbines, compressors, downhole tools and in Baker Hughes’ measurement and sensor product lines too.
“In oil and gas, it is a high mix, low volume type of play” Gladkikh says. “That’s why additive is perfect because you can design and manufacture parts economically for a load of one – sometimes that’s what we have to do. There’s lots of very simple components that don’t make sense for additive, but there are also lots of complex assemblies, like hydraulic manifolds or different types of completion equipment, where additive makes a lot of sense. This is where additive is best; where we can not only cut lead time because of the process or supply chain approach, but we can also redesign and improve functional performance because additive allows us to open up the design envelope and make possible solutions that were impossible before with conventional.”
Unlocking these possibilities is to take Baker Hughes’ application of 3D printing to the next level. Not only does the company want to reduce weight, componentry and cost, but it also wants to leverage the technology to keep components operational and keep operations running.
@enrico sacchetti
Right now, out in the field, drilling deep down into the Earth’s surface, is a proof of concept drill bit manufactured with a hybrid technique that teams 5-axis CNC milling and Direct Energy Deposition (DED). This drill bit is machined to a near net shape - because the volume of material needed ‘doesn’t make sense for additive’ - before the DED process adds 17-4PH stainless steel material to the blades with cutters inserted later. Typically, downhole drill bits like this are discarded after a few uses such is the wear and tear of the component, but utilising this hybrid approach and Baker Hughes’ scanning equipment borrowed from its inspection business, the company will restore the drill bit to its original shape by adding material on to the existing substrate and redeploy the component.
“If you have an obsolete part, you need to understand what the functional performance of that part is,” Gladkikh explains, “and sometimes that is going to be damaged. You need to use your engineering skills and engineering first principles to restore it back to make sure that it performs the function that it was designed for. With [this hybrid process], you can restore it back to that shape or you can also think about how we can improve the shape, so it performs that functional role better.”
This process is set to be applied to a host of drill bit products across the Baker Hughes business, with the company also able to deposit 316 stainless steel, Inconel 17 and tungsten carbide using that hybrid technique. While 3D printing has the capability to restore these components to be re-used, there are many occasions where parts need to be completely replaced in order to keep operations moving.
Gladkikh says many Baker Hughes customers face losses of hundreds of thousands of dollars a day when a spare part is required but neither the inventory is adequately stocked nor the regional manufacturer responsive. Baker Hughes is thus setting up an Emergency Services offering with 3D printing technology at the heart of production and 3D scanning again being deployed to reverse engineer parts once a ‘design triage’ process is carried out. This service will work to actively reduce physical inventory, a concept already in action at Baker Hughes, as well as facilitate local manufacturing, producing parts as close as possible to the point of need.
@enrico sacchetti
Baker Hughes
“If a plant or asset is down, the cost of downtime is a lot more than the cost of printing that spare part; this is where we add a lot of exponential value, we can quickly utilise our capabilities in 3D scanning, reverse engineering and design for additive, and print those spare parts,” Gladkikh explains.
Baker Hughes is enjoying this added value to an industry-leading extent. Hundreds of parts printed thousands of times have been qualified to the same requirements as thousands more conventionally manufactured components. The company is not just redesigning existing parts to reduce the weight and cost, but also looking to reduce waste through the restoration of existing components and streamline the supply chains of itself and customers. This across several continents and dozens of countries. And there’s more to come.
“We definitely see additive as a core competency and as one of the key technologies for the future. Together with machine learning and edge computing, this will take energy forward and we’re at the forefront,” Gladkikh says before adding: “But we need to see more robust machines, bigger sized machines and more material variety. We need to automate to minimise powder handling, we need to fully take advantage of that design freedom capability and we’re working with some of our digital partners, such as ANSYS and Autodesk, to use their suite of generative design technologies.
“Another application we’re exploring, and we already have products where this is implemented, is multi-material. This opens up a whole new envelope. Another opportunity is smart devices, embedding sensors into the tools and products we’re additively manufacturing today, to truly transform the performance of those products.
“This is the future; this is where we’re going.”
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