GE Additive AddWorks helps GA-ASI complete milestone first flight with 3D-printed metal part

May 19, 2020 | AUVSI News

GA-ASI has spent the last nine years building deep experience with polymer-based additive technologies. Over the last few years, the company has made improvements in the development of its metal additive roadmap, as well as a dedicated additive manufacturing team.

After establishing the required ecosystem requirements to develop its metal additive manufacturing application space, the GA-ASI Additive Manufacturing (AM) team identified a series of parts and families of applications that had potential favorable business cases. 

In 2019, GE Additive AddWorks was selected by the GA-ASI AM core team to support the acceleration of metal laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) additive development at GA-ASI. The goal was to have the first 3D-printed metal part take flight within an aggressive timeline.

The companies began working together in April 2019. While working together, a wide range of engineering consultancy services was performed including design for additive (DfAM) training, industrialization process development and materials validation for Titanium and other metals, which was meant to optimize part design and accelerate part qualification.

Within just eight months, the GA-ASI additive manufacturing team achieved the milestone that it had set for itself, as the team performed the company’s first test flight of a metal 3D-printed part—a NACA inlet made in Titanium Ti6Al4V—on a SkyGuardian RPA in early February 2020.

The GA-ASI AM team wanted to secure an early win, so it had already begun identifying a pipeline of suitable components for metal additive manufacturing and had started to tie them back to GA-ASI’s business priorities. During that process, a NACA inlet1 was identified as a strong contender to be the first metal 3D-printed part for the SkyGuardian program.

GA-ASI selected the NACA inlet as its first metal component to be qualified after assessing the business case, part criticality and program impacts. By unlocking design potential and providing expertise to reduce deterministically the qualification risks, the GE Additive AddWorks team was able to accelerate and support the industrialization process and production readiness of the NACA inlet.

“We know firsthand that the ability to secure buy-in from multiple cross-functional stakeholders is often critical to the success of any metal additive program within an organization,” says Lauren Thompson, operations project manager at GE Additive AddWorks and part of the team working with GA-ASI.

“By adding GE’s prior experience and perspective to the GA-ASI’s internal leadership efforts, the joint team was able to reach the required project momentum in order to meet their milestone.”

The NACA inlet will now enter the final qualification phase for the SkyGuardian program following the successful test flight.

According to GE Additive, the reimagined single piece NACA inlet in Titanium Ti6Al4V offers GA-ASI significant reductions to its weight and cost, especially when compared to the conventional method of manufacturing that makes the inlet from three parts of welded formed sheet metal Titanium, which made tooling, fabrication labor and weld inspection a challenge, GE Additive notes.

Instead of being manufactured as three pieces, the inlet is now additively manufactured as a single piece on a Concept Laser M2 machine and delivers a cost reduction per part of more than 90 percent, weight reduction of over 30 percent, and tooling reduction of approximately 85 percent.

Consolidating the number of parts offers several benefits, including reduced procurement cost, as well as a simplification of GA-ASI’s supply chain and inventory requirements as a result of reduced assembly and inspection time.

Following the successful completion of the work on the first inlet, the GA-ASI team is already applying best practices and knowledge to its wider NACA inlet part family and several other components and sub-systems.

GA-ASI has placed an order for multiple GE Additive Concept Laser M2 Series 5 machines, which will be installed at its new Additive Design & Manufacturing Center of Excellence in Poway, California this year. This will add to its already existing non-metal AM capabilities. The strategy to achieve production was to establish the necessary ecosystem of knowledge and tools to achieve industrialization level. Adding internal printing capabilities will serve GA-ASI’s application space development, and will also facilitate rapid reaction manufacturing. 

The GE Additive AddWorks team has become trusted advisors to GA-ASI. As it moves to further scale metal additive across its business by enabling additional metal additive components for various programs, the team will likely continue to provide consultancy and expert advice as it moves.

“With the GE Additive AddWorks team, we were able not only to achieve our short term objective of qualifying the NACA inlet, but we also worked together on a number of additional application development and qualification efforts, which are continuing into 2020 and beyond,” says Elie Yehezkel, senior vice president of Advanced Manufacturing Technologies for GA-ASI.

“It is important that we remain at the leading edge of manufacturing technologies for our products and our customers. This acceleration has driven the maturation of our metal AM strategy and has also informed how we plan to approach a much wider application space already in the pipeline.”