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Above: 3D printing and dozens of other new technologies used for the first time in a civilian turboprop engine allowed the team to combine 855 separate components into just 12. GIF credit: GE Aviation. Top image: Steve Erickson in his Prague test cell. “There is no engine like it in the world,” Erickson said. Photo credit: Tomas Kellner/GE Reports.
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3D printing and dozens of other new technologies used for the first time in a civilian turboprop engine allowed the team to combine 855 separate components into just 12, shave off more than 100 pounds in weight, improve fuel burn by as much as 20 percent, give it 10 percent more power and simplify maintenance. “This engine is a game changer,” Corkery says.
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Some 400 GE designers, engineers and materials experts in the Czech Republic, Italy, Germany, Poland, the U.S. and elsewhere spent the last two years developing the engine. More than a third of the ATP is 3D-printed from advanced alloys.
For example, the designers included components in the engine’s compressor that were originally developed for supersonic engines. These parts, called variable vanes, will allow it to fly efficiently even in thin air at high altitudes. They also developed a new digital way to control the turboprop engine that will enable pilots to fly it like a jet, with just a single lever instead of three. How easy is it to fly with the new controls? “I would use the phrase ‘revolutionary simplicity,’” says Brad Thress, senior vice president of engineering at aircraft maker Textron Aviation. Textron’s new Cessna Denali will be the first plane to use the engine. During his three decades at GE Aviation, Erickson has been involved in testing the company’s workhorse engines, including the T700 engine for Black Hawk helicopters and the T408 engine for the Super Stallion and King Stallion, America’s most powerful helicopter. But he says that in his career he hasn’t seen “anything like the ATP.” Erickson’s long and tall test cell in Prague is one of several attached to GE Aviation’s factory here. Employees at the plant assemble and service GE turboprop engines for commuter, agricultural and even acrobatic planes flying on six continents, like the L-410 and the Thrush crop duster. Workers at the plant spent the fall assembling the first ATP engine in a special room next to the test cell. In early December, the team