Additive Machines Technology

Metal additive manufacturing has emerged as one of the world’s most transformative technologies. While it promises a new era of constraint-free design and product performance, it faces practical limitations in build size, speed, and repeatability, which hinder the realization of its full potential. GE Research offers partnerships in cutting edge technologies to solve these challenges and push the limits of the application space.

In Direct Metal Laser Melting, we have made significant advances in new machine concepts that have enabled 10x gains in build speed, size, and re-configurability. Additionally, we envision a step-change in the process performance by introducing new analytic and control technologies that ensure process stability. GE’s capabilities in this area include Melt-pool monitoring, iterative learning control, continuous auto-calibration, and real-time melt-pool control.

We have also made remarkable strides in Electron Beam Melting, a powerful modality for crack-prone metal alloys, such as Titanium. We are advancing the technology for breakthrough productivity, feature resolution, and part quality, through the development of high-performance electron beam sources and in-situ process monitoring using “self-generated” x-ray imaging and backscatter electron technologies. We are building on GE Research’s decades of expertise in x-ray tubes and imaging technologies developed for Medical Systems to mature and industrialize the EBM additive modality.

We see Binder jet as a promising new modally with game changing impact on cost and speed. We have created novel support structure designs and clean-burning binders to solve two key technology challenges of sintering distortion and material properties.