Back in the 1960s, the Swedish pulp and paper industry was in desperate need of an efficient control valve solution for fiber suspensions. Rising to the challenge, Swedish engineer Torsten Ramén initiated the development of the Ramén Ball Sector Valve precisely for this purpose, and Ramén Valves was born.

Fast forward 60 years, and the company is again revolutionizing the industry as one of the first valve manufacturers in the world to offer control valves in Titanium Grade 5 using additive manufacturing - in a sector typically dominated by casting and the machining of bar stocks.

This additive manufacturing journey began after 2012 when Managing Director Per Wennersten took the helm. Since then, the company has created an exciting movement in an industry with a reputation for being slow to adopt new technologies.

“In 2016 we met Arcam, now part of GE Additive, at a tradeshow in Gothenburg. We saw the opportunities in the technology and started using their Electron Beam Melting (EBM) printers because they were the best option for printing titanium,” explained Wennersten.

Titanium is a metal that is commonly used in pulp and paper applications. EBM has become a stalwart machine for producing parts made of this and other hard-to-process alloys. Ramén Valves has stuck with EBM due to good results and the economic infeasibility of switching to a new printing method after so many years of development.

3D-printing innovation in the valves industry

As the only company showcasing 3D-printed valves at a conference in Dusseldorf in 2017, it became apparent to Wennersten that Ramén Valves may be one of the first in its industry to be using additive manufacturing technology.

Working with AIM Sweden, a commercial spin-off of an additive manufacturing research group based at the Mid Sweden University in Östersund, the general EBM titanium processes were optimized specifically to print valves.

“AIM Sweden is a service bureau specializing in EBM technology and its industrial applications. The ball sector valves from Ramén Valves are a very good example of where the EBM process can really add value,” said Stefan Thundal, AIM Sweden’s CEO. “First, many of these valves are used in critical applications, where confidence in material properties is paramount. Second, these valves are often large, bulky components, and for such components, the EBM process excels, both in productivity and providing parts free from residual stress. Finally, we can offer Ramén Valves significantly shorter lead times.”

“I remember back then there really wasn’t much interest in what we were doing, as the industry hadn’t considered 3D-printed valves before,” said Wennersten. “This is now changing as end-user industries start to see the benefits of additive manufacturing. Currently we are focused on making titanium valves but are looking to expand out into duplex and super duplex stainless steels and Hastelloy.”

“Ever since the start of our collaboration we have worked extremely well with Ramén Valves,” added Thundal. “We truly look forward to expanding the use of EBM technology in the future.”

The benefits of additive and a surprising niche

Additive manufacturing has multiple benefits, particularly when it comes to design freedom and reduced manufacturing times. 

Ramén Valves first started producing valves that had an extended functionality, where they adapted the build length of the valve to improve its design. In addition, the technology allows the production of parts made of specific alloys and the creation of parts that have a complex geometry—opening up the valves to new applications. There is hope in the future to use additive to increase the productivity of existing processes by adding extra functions.

The switch to additive manufacturing also removed the long lead and shipping times for receiving parts as most traditional casting work is done out in Asia. For example, a Ramén Ball Sector valve for the pulp and paper industry can be delivered within four weeks compared to two months with more traditional manufacturing.

As the technology builds a part in layers material waste and consumption are minimized and with more local production, associated supply chain impacts are vastly reduced.

Beyond the benefits of manufacturing new parts, additive manufacturing is playing a key role for Ramén Valves in an interesting new niche - retrofitting applications. The production of many valves in existing piping systems has been discontinued, but rather than the costly option of rebuilding or replacing this piping infrastructure, many companies are looking to keep their existing systems.

This is driving a need to produce exact copies of the discontinued valves. As they are bespoke, casting and machining them traditionally in large volumes is not a feasible approach, but the ability to print them on demand in small quantities (often a one-off) has created a new market for Ramén Valves.

Addressing certification and cost

Any new technology adoption brings challenges. It can take time for new technologies to work properly for an intended application. It can also take time for people within an industry to be convinced that a new technology is better than the status quo. In the valves industry the two key challenges are certification and cost.

The industries that use these valves―process industries such as chemical plants and paper and pulp plants―are highly regulated and there are restrictions to what pressurized equipment can be used. "We think that the certification of 3D-printed parts in our industry could help to bring prices down and grow the market. It’s currently not possible to get a materials certification for 3D printed parts, as you can for casted or machined parts,” said Wennersten.

“There has been some development towards certification thanks to compliance and certification organizations such as TÜV,  Lloyds and DEKRA, but there is still no definitive method for having the 3D printed parts in pressurized conditions. Without certification, it is impossible to obtain a CE Mark and we are unable to sell the valves in Europe.”

Ramén Valves has developed its own in-house certification, distributed with units sold, but it is limited because it’s not verified by a third party. The company is currently in discussion with DEKRA to investigate certification possibilities going forward.

In terms of cost it is still currently more costly to make parts using additive manufacturing than by traditional machining or casting. If certifications become available for 3D-printed valves, this could all change as there’ll be a bigger interest in the market.

Outsourcing printing rather than owning a machine

Ramén Valves remains a pioneer of additive manufacturing in the valves industry, but the market is currently not yet big enough to justify purchasing an in-house machine. The company outsources the production of its designs to service bureaus such as AIM, which brings the valves to life.

“We don’t own our own castings, we buy our valves from someone who can cast them according to our specifications, so we are interested to understand the additive printing landscape across Europe to find companies that own machines and have space for our geometries. Each company has its own specialization. We’ll certainly continue to work with AIM Sweden on titanium valves but would like to partner with other expertise in the stainless-steel industry to create 3D-printed duplex and super duplex steel valves,” said Wennersten.

“We are not a user of the printer; we are buying the services. There are a lot of companies that could make use of having printer suppliers instead of buying expensive castings from Asia. If there are more suppliers of these services, it’s possible manufacture locally and the environmental footprint from shipping would also be much lower.”

Looking to the future

While the market is still currently small for 3D-printed valves, there is a lot of interest and potential to improve output in coming years. Ramén Valves is currently working with customers that purchase and use different processing valves to discuss the paperwork needed to adopt this new technology in highly regulated settings. “While the focus now is on complex geometries, it’s hoped that the ability to use these valves for pressurized systems in the coming years will open doors to new applications and markets,” Wennersten concluded.

All images courtesy of Ramen Valves

“Once upon a time, there was a piece of wood,” begins Carlo Collodi’s enduring classic Pinocchio, a story loved for 140 years, except that in Guillermo del Toro’s 2022 spectacular animated remake, there was stainless steel, GE Additive's Mlab additive manufacturing machine and the talented team at Laser Prototypes Europe (LPE) in Belfast in Northern Ireland.

LPE, a GE Additive customer, is the UK and Ireland's longest-established 3D-printing service bureau. They have been using the latest additive manufacturing technologies to turn ideas into reality for more than 30 years, bringing new products to the market faster than ever before. This was certainly the case when the company was approached to collaborate on del Toro’s vision.

Puppets and an Oscar®

The Mexican filmmaker and author first conceptualized his film Pinocchio in 2008 when he approached the puppet-making company Mackinnon & Saunders with ideas for an unconventional type of stop-motion film. However, the kind of fully mobile, highly detailed puppet del Toro envisioned wasn’t possible at the time given the limitations of technology.

Twelve years later, Mackinnon & Saunders approached LPE about utilising advances in metal printing to finally create the kind of puppet needed for the film. The result: the first-ever use of metal printing in a stop-motion picture… and an Oscar!

Rather than the traditional method of using thousands of casted puppet iterations and changing them for each shot, del Toro believed that a single figure with moveable joints would enable more organic, free-flowing movement. This would hopefully result in a more expansive and convincing range of expressions.

“We have been supplying into the UK film industry for 20 to 25 years now at the top end, including, for example, X-Men and Game of Thrones. McKinnon & Saunders  is a leading puppet maker in the UK and a longstanding customer of ours. They brought us in to determine the viability of 3D printing for the project,” said Patrick Walls, engineering director at LPE. “Due to the fact that they were mechanizing the puppets and making them into essentially miniature robots, the requirement from the outset was for metals over plastics. That’s why we chose stainless steel, to ensure that the puppet wouldn’t deflect when it moved and there wouldn’t be a bending force.”

A collaborative process

Following a consultation, it was decided that the puppet would need multiple components in metal to then be fit together. The inside of the torso would be hollowed out to enable inner mechanical features that would allow for functional movement of the limbs.

At the beginning of the collaboration, the design team from the studio sent files to LPE, and the process flowed from there. The company’s engineers would sense check for printability and provide feedback to the designers regarding support structures and print strategy. The teams went back and forth with a few design iterations before the work began.

Multiple versions of the puppet would be required, and since all would be used on-screen, each version had to be exactly the same, down to the finest details. A team of five finished the parts, smoothing the surfaces of threads and holes, some as fine as 1mm. The parts were assembled and fitted with a plastic printed front torso.

“We had to develop a protocol as to how they were hand finished to make sure that each of the team members was sanding and removing support structures in such a way as to avoid bringing up lines or marks.That was really the key concern – how to make the puppets identical and to preserve as much of the natural, organic-looking shapes of a wooden body as possible. It was meticulous, slow and methodical, but we got there in the end!” explained Walls.  

Nothing but the Mlab

To print the 3D puppet in stainless steel, LPE used GE Additive’s Mlab metal printer. Walls says, in his opinion, the Mlab has the best resolution on the market and this was a crucial factor in being able to deliver del Toro’s vision.

“It's a 100-watt laser as opposed to a 400-watt laser. The result is that, when you're printing a part, it takes a lot longer because it's using less laser power and a smaller beam diameter, but the resolution of the part is far greater. For this project the size of the parts were about 60 millimeters in height and the bed size is about 90 millimeters, so for this project it was a great match.”

LPE’s ethos is that it is a high-value-added partner and likes to work closely with customers to discover the most suitable additive machine and processes to use. For this Pinocchio project, McKinnon & Saunders genuinely didn’t believe del Toro’s vision would be possible when they first started out, so they were delighted when LPE was able to prove them wrong on that front!

“It really was a credit to the Mlab that we were able to hit the resolution that McKinnon & Saunders required, and the rest was down to our technical ability to match their dimensional accuracy on threads and finishing, making sure that was a repeated finish. Thanks to our wealth of experience with the machine and knowledge of its capabilities, we were confident we could deliver repeatable results,” said Walls.

A metal first for puppetry

The end result was that McKinnon & Saunders, and del Toro, were thrilled. “They were blown away by the quality. One of the things they just weren't sure about was whether the process would show up the wood grain effect on the body. They just didn't think it was possible. As soon as the first trials were done, they told us the result was brilliant. They knew it was going to work, and there wasn’t any looking back from there; we went ahead with the metal additive option.”

McKinnon & Saunders was not the first to use additive manufacturing in creative and design processes for puppets, but they were pioneers in using the level of metal printed for armature and puppetry. “That’s what’s really unique about this project,” said Walls. “My understanding is that the way they were able to make the puppets so human and realistic was down to the stiffness of the robotics that they were able to achieve because of the metal rather than plastics.”

A long partnership for the future

The team at Laser Prototypes Europe was proud to have been involved in such a ground-breaking adaptation of a classic. The film re-imagined an age-old story, as did the engineering behind the technology that made it happen. It’s a story of art and additive manufacturing pushing the boundaries of what is possible.

“We’ve had a long relationship with GE Additive. Our very first metal machine was from them, and we now have a second as we look to the future. When the film came out, I was thrilled to be able to say to my son and daughter that we helped to make those puppets! It’s hard to believe how many things we've put our stamp on with GE Additive’s support. It's brilliant; it keeps the day-to-day interesting,” concluded Walls.

All images courtesy of LPE (Laser Prototypes Europe, LTD)

GE Aerospace Advanced Technology Munich-led European consortium unveils one of the largest-ever metal 3D-printed aerospace parts and demonstrates significant cost, weight and time savings

• One-meter-in-diameter part manufactured in nickel alloy 718 on a GE Additive system is one of largest aerospace parts additively manufactured using the Direct Metal Laser Melting (DMLM) process.
• Shift from conventional casting to additive manufacturing reduces cost and weight by 30%.
• Consolidation combines over 150 parts into one. 
• Lead time was reduced from more than nine months to two and a half months.

The EU's European Green Deal sets out the need to reduce transport emissions by 90% by 2050, compared to 1990 levels, with the aviation sector playing its part. Policy actions and industry efforts since 2005 have led to greater fuel efficiency per passenger. Priorities going forward include financial and regulatory measures to drive low-emissions aviation and the urgent development of clean sheet frames, new aircraft engines and propulsion systems and Sustainable Aviation Fuel.

One significant research initiative underway to develop these types of more fuel efficient air transport technologies for the earliest possible deployment is the European Commission and European aerospace industry-funded Clean Sky 2 Programme, now entering its final phase. Its successor Clean Aviation was launched in December 2021.

The Clean Sky 2 program is made up of key industry players and subject matter experts along with academic research bodies across Europe. The program is integrating, demonstrating, and validating technologies capable of reducing CO2 emissions as well as nitrous oxide (NOx) and noise emissions by up to 30% compared to 2014 "state-of-the-art" aircraft. Another goal is to develop a strong and globally competitive aeronautical industry and supply chain in Europe. 

Based in Munich, Germany, GE Aerospace Advanced Technology (GE AAT) Munich team leads three core partnerships in the Clean Sky 2 program to identify engine hardware, benefits, design, manufacturing process and, connected to the program’s goals, collaborate closely with GE Aerospace’s sites in Italy, Czech Republic, Poland and Turkey, as well as external partners.

Changing the Game for Large Metal Additive Parts

One of the GE AAT Munich-led partnerships is the Turbine Technology Project (TURN), which was set up to accelerate technology maturation for future aero engines.

And in response to a Clean Sky 2 call for proposals, in 2018 a consortium of Hamburg University of Technology (TUHH), TU Dresden (TUD) and technology company Autodesk, was selected to support GE AAT Munich for the design and manufacturing of a large-scale metal additive manufacturing component – the Advanced Additive Integrated Turbine Centre Frame (TCF) casing – the MONACO project. This also included the design and production of coupons and critical parts, validation and qualification, and the final delivery of the full-sized metal 3D-printed casing.

After almost six years in R&D and engineering, the large-format TCF casing design using GE Additive’s Direct Metal Laser Melting (DMLM) technology in nickel alloy 718 was recently unveiled by the consortium.

The TCF casing is one of largest additively manufactured parts produced for the aerospace industry. It is designed for narrow-body engines in which the part is approximately one meter or more in diameter. Having this single-piece design solution to produce this kind of large format engine hardware with reduced cost, weight and manufacturing lead time gives a competitive business advantage.

Equivalent to one meter in diameter, the first-ever metal 3D-printed TCF casing using DMLM technology in nickel alloy 718. Image credit: GE Aerospace

“We wanted to reduce the weight of the part by 25% but also improve the pressure losses of the secondary air flow as well as a strong reduction in part count to improve maintenance,” said Dr. Günter Wilfert, GE AAT Munich’s technology and operations manager. 

“The team can be proud of the results. With the final print of the full casing, they were able to prove the values. Those targets were achieved and surpassed. We were able to reduce the weight by ~30% in the end. The team also reduced the manufacturing lead time from nine months to two and a half months, by approximately 75%.  Over 150 separate parts that make up a conventional turbine center frame casing have been consolidated into one single piece design,” he added.

To ensure that all the engineering requirements were met, including a performance benefit of 0.2% in specific fuel consumption, the design was reviewed by experts from across the team for Technology Readiness Level (TRL) and Manufacturing Readiness Level (MRL) 4 and multiple manufacturing trials were performed to meet hardware quality and incorporate the manufacturability of MRL4. 

Reducing Reliance on Castings and Future Applications

Outside the environmental, performance, weight, cost benefits and reduction of waste material of this new part, perhaps the biggest impact will be supply chain disruption in all industries facing challenges with their casting in conventional manufacturing.

The turbine center frame, an inherent component of modern, turbofan aircraft engines, serves as a duct for the hot gas that flows from the high-pressure turbine into the low-pressure turbine. Conventionally, they are manufactured by casting and/or forging, followed by additional machining steps.

Due to stringent requirements on airworthy hardware in the highly regulated aerospace industry, the number of approved vendors for casting and forging parts is very limited. This creates long lead times and high costs. These challenges, and the fact that a turbine center frame isn’t a rotating part, made it an ideal candidate for additive manufacturing.

This new additive manufacturing design solution on engine frames is not limited to turbine center frames for future engines; it can be leveraged to existing and legacy engine center frames. The proposed design features can also be transferred and/or scaled to turbine rear frames (TRF), low pressure turbine casings and turbine mid frames (TMF).

“People already want to know how this part has been made and how the design and technology could translate to their industries. Our strategy all along was to make sure that the component design meets aerospace engineering requirements and Clean Sky 2 goals, but it could be easily translated to other similar segment engines, and adjacent businesses and sectors,” said Ashish Sharma, an advanced lead engineer on the GE AAT team.

“Additive manufacturing offers enormous potential to lower weight, improve component functionalities, and substantially reduce part count in complex assemblies, directly increasing aircraft energy efficiency, and reducing assembly costs and time,” said Christina-Maria Margariti, project officer for hydrogen-powered aircraft for Clean Aviation.

“The Clean Aviation program, in line with the EU Green Deal objective of carbon neutrality by 2050, supports the launch of disruptive new products by 2035, with the aim to replace 75% of the operating fleet by 2050. Faster time to market and increased production rates will therefore be crucial to reaching these ambitious environmental targets,” she added. 

Industry-Academic Collaboration

The consortium team regards its work, and the part itself, as potential game-changer in the use of metal additive manufacturing for the future production of large parts for commercial aircraft engines.

Sharma has led the project since its inception. “At first, the engineering almost seemed to be impossible, but by leveraging advanced additive technologies and pushing boundaries that stretched our limit, we have achieved a design that was only in our imagination and far away from a reality never thought of before,” said Sharma.

Sharma said it’s been an enormous achievement and reflects, from the outset, the talent and drive of the consortium members. “The team is smart. Bringing everyone together and putting in place support structures for the build that were unconventional meant we optimized not only the hardware but our processes. It was wonderful to see the collaboration, everyone with different backgrounds working together. This aspect was unique.”

The involvement of academia has been critical to the overall success of the project, enabling them to become part of a large European technology program by collaborating closely with industry, using their infrastructure and maturing different technologies.

Everybody, Sharma said, had their part to play. “Hamburg University of Technology has a GE Additive M2 machine installed on campus, and their expertise with prototyping was invaluable, while the team at TU Dresden was responsible for validation and building a dedicated test rig. Autodesk optimized the Design for Additive Manufacturing process, and finally GE Additive supported us by printing the part using its A.T.L.A.S machine.

“Having such a talented, additive-experienced team brought a lot of new ideas and concepts in fundamentals that we wouldn’t necessarily have thought about if we were working in our individual teams. There was a lot of ingenuity” he added.

The project employed a multi-disciplinary iteration loop setup to design the hardware and leveraged Lean manufacturing concepts, processes and tools to reduce design iteration time. Many innovative and creative design features and solutions were considered and introduced to reduce pressure, thermal gradient and stress.

Dr. Dirk Herzog, interim professor at TUHH’s Institut für Laser- und Anlagensystemtechnik, said, “Due to the size of the part, it was necessary to evaluate design concepts by manufacturing segments at first, validate their performance and from there learn how to transfer to full scale. A lot of effort has been invested from all of the team members over the course of the last three-and-a-half years to advance us to the point where we were fully confident to have the design and the DMLM process ready for the final print. To finally see the physical part being built successfully is very rewarding.”

At the beginning of the TURN program GE AAT Munich explored the design space and performed multiple trade studies leveraging advanced technologies such as additive manufacturing. The GE AAT Munich team was able to lay down a technology maturation plan to advance the art of making TCF cases.

Finally, when the consortium started to support the technology maturation plan, Autodesk brought advanced tools to optimize additive design, TUHH added additive machine for initial print trials and TUD’s experts built an aero/thermal rig with state-of-the-art instrumentation devices for validation – which blends to give satisfying results at the very first attempt to deliver a successful 3600 single-piece additive TCF case.

“The biggest challenges to validating additively manufactured hardware is that we are not allowed to scale up or down, as this changes the surface finish, which reflects in measurement data translated to product. We contributed our unique experience in testing print trials for mechanical strength, thermal emissivity and aero/thermal validation,” said Thomas IIzig, Eike Dohmen and Sarah Korb, TUD’s team of scientists.

“The team went ahead and designed and manufactured a novel three-hole probe to measure pressure loss on the additive TCF casing, which demonstrated a reduction of around 90% in pressure drop compared to a conventional design. The TCF casing underwent extensive aero/thermal and mechanical testing to meet engineering requirements,” they added.

Autodesk’s role in this research was to develop a lightweight, high performance turbine center frame casing by optimizing the structural and fluid performance while contributing to consolidate over 150 parts into a single component. Team Autodesk were instrumental in taking challenges to design component utilizing there software tools to meet program requirements. 

From right to left: Dr. Hermann Scheugenpflug (GE Aerospace), Dr. Dirk Herzog (TUHH), Dr. Andreas Peters (GE Aerospace), Nick Markovic (Autodesk), Ashish Sharma (GE Aerospace, Project Leader), Dr. Andrea Milli (GE Aerospace), Dr. Guenter Wilfert (GE Aerospace), Andy Harris (Autodesk), Philipp Manger (Autodesk). Image credit: GE Aerospace

In the 1980s, when the U.S. Air Force opened up what is now known as the Great Engine War for propulsion systems to power its F-16 and F-15 fleets, GE saw its chance to again become a major supplier of power plants for fighter aircraft. Its engineers had developed the engine for the B-1 supersonic bomber, and they used its powerful and efficient beating heart — called the core — to design a new jet engine, the F110.

Today, the Air Force is searching for the best, nimblest ways to procure parts, including crucial spare parts, it needs for planes that have been in service for decades. GE’s engineers are building a 3D-printed sump cover for the GE F110 engine. The sump is part of the oil lubrication system, and the sump cover is a cap —and a key part of the engine. 

Challenge: Spare parts for readiness

The US Air Force’s Rapid Sustainment Office (RSO) is charged with increasing mission readiness by rapidly identifying, applying and scaling technology essential to the operation and sustainment of its fleet. With a significant number of aircraft soon entering their sixth decade of service, difficulties in sourcing and producing spare parts potentially represents significant risk. 

GE’s experience qualifying and certifying additively manufactured metal components that meet the commercial aviation sector’s rigorous regulatory requirements was of interest to the RSO as the Air Force continues to shape its own metal additive airworthiness and certification path.

Strategy

GE’s collaboration with the RSO has been the first time that GE Additive's and GE Aviation’s engineering and supply-chain teams have partnered for the benefit of an external customer. The Air Force wanted to:

• Go fast to gain the capability and capacity of metal additive manufacturing, as rapidly as possible, to improve readiness and sustainment.
• Explore how to quickly eliminate the associated risks of castings and investigate how metal additive might replace castings for those parts that are either no longer in production or where they need smaller production runs to keep our platforms flying.

The US Air Force and GE settled on a program based on a “spiral development” model (based on a concept often used to enhance software development) that increases in complexity and scale with each phase. In this program, complexity involves moving from simpler part identification, progressing to part and family-of-parts consolidation, and eventually tackling complex components and systems, such as common core heat exchangers.

Results

The GE Additive team - headed by James Bonar - partnered closely with the GE Aviation team to build on the exploratory work on the sump cover, which was conventionally cast in aluminum. Bonar’s team ensured the robust design practices were met during the fine tuning of parameters and the dial-in process at GE Aviation’s Additive Technology Center (ATC) in Cincinnati. GE Additive Concept Laser M2 machines, running cobalt-chrome at the ATC, were used for the first builds of additively manufactured sump covers. 

Phase 1b is already being planned in line with the spiral development model, adding complexity to focus on a sump cover housing, a family of parts on the TF34 engine - which has been in service for more than 40 years. As the program enters this next phase, the combined US Air Force and GE team finds itself at an exciting intersection: rapidly solving problems today for the US Air Force’s immediate readiness and sustainment needs, while turning its attention to tomorrow and how additive will advance and inform design, manufacturing and certification of things we’ve never seen before in the commercial and military aerospace sectors.

Learn about the development of the first 3D-printed hip implants, enabled by GE Additive and in use all over the over the world today.

You can fashion almost anything on a 3D printer these days, from the most intricate airplane parts to near-perfect replicas of the human skull. But back in 2007, few had printed an object that could be implanted into someone else’s body.
That is, until an Italian surgeon named Dr. Guido Grappiolo found a patient who needed a hip replacement. When the patient first came to him a decade ago, she had advanced arthritis and a titanium hip cup that doctors had already implanted with screws.

Grappiolo, of Fondazione Livio Sciutto ONLUS in Savona, Italy, joined forces with orthopedic implant maker LimaCorporate and Arcam, a manufacturer of 3D printers that is now part of GE Additive, for what would be a landmark operation. With their help, he implanted the world’s first 3D-printed replacement hip cup, the Delta-TT Cup. The TT stands for “Trabecular Titanium” a biomaterial “characterized by a regular, three-dimensional, hexagonal cell structure that imitates trabecular bone morphology,” according to LimaCorporate.

A few months after the operation, Grappiolo looked at a CT scan of the patient and saw that her bone tissue had already started to grow into the 3D-printed hexagonal cells of the implant. “From a technical point of view, we immediately got a good feeling of stability,” he said in a recent video interview, when asked to recall how the surgery went.

Grappiolo, who caught up with his female patient from 10 years ago to record the video, asked her to bend her leg back toward her chest. Then, he helped her rotate it. “The first patient is doing extremely well,” he said in the video.

Top: “Trabecular Titanium 3D-printed replacement hip cup” is a biomaterial “characterized by a regular, three-dimensional, hexagonal cell structure that imitates trabecular bone morphology,” according to LimaCorporate. Above: LimaCorporate's Delta-TT cups. Images credit: LimaCorporate.

How long will a 3D-printed hip replacement last? As yet there’s no frame of reference. But signs are good, considering Grappiolo’s patient is still going strong, as are many others. The surgeon has since implanted close to 600 hip cups — his group has implanted over 1,500 — that were created by 3D printers made by the likes of Arcam. He believes the devices could last “a lifetime.” Many other doctors worldwide use the 3D-printed Delta-TT cup for their daily practice, resulting in thousands of implants used in patients since the first implant. That promises an improvement on conventionally manufactured implants.

It wouldn’t be unusual for someone with a traditional hip operation to get their implant replaced after 10 to 15 years, says Maria Pettersson, an orthopedic industry specialist with Arcam. Commonly, they could stretch that to well over 20 years, she says.

Orthopedic implant makers like LimaCorporate can also customize the design of the final implant according to the patient’s and surgeon’s needs, keeping the same features of the original structure, including the complex 3-dimensional hexagonal cells on the surface.

This level of design freedom and the ability to potentially tailor implants to different patient’s necessities is why 3D printing also increasingly is being used for dental implants, hearing aids, prosthetics and even surgical tools.

Pettersson estimates that overall more than 100,000 3D-printed hip cups have been made in Arcam printers and implanted in patients. There are likely hundreds of thousands more that have been made in printers from other companies.

While that is still a minor proportion of the overall number of hip replacements that hospitals are carrying out today, the demand from surgeons and manufacturers is growing, says Pettersson. “If you’re not in it, you realize you’re behind.”

This article was originally published on GE Reports.