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GE: Industry in 3D
Fig. 8 GE Additive’s Customer Experience Center (CEC) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, is designed to accelerate the use of Additive Manufacturing with GE customers across several industries (Courtesy GE)
Other high-volume AM successes highlighted Many of the invited speakers at Industry in 3D highlighted the fact that, for their businesses, AM is very much in the here and now. Kim Smith, Additive Manufacturing leader at Boeing, told the audience that her company has manufactured and delivered 60,000 additively manufactured parts, including components for passenger and military aircraft as well as the International Space Station. Stryker Corporation, which uses GE Additive machines to produce titanium medical implants with uniquely engineered surfaces that foster bone in-growth or osseointegration, also highlighted how AM is now in highvolume production within the business. John Haller, VP Global Supply at Stryker, explained to participants that investments in AM have enabled the company to focus on the development of innovative new products that
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would be impossible with traditional manufacturing methods, and it was revealed that Stryker has already supplied hundreds of thousands of these AM titanium implants. These are produced at the company’s AM manufacturing hub in Carrigtohill, County Cork, Ireland, reported to be one of the world’s largest and most sophisticated metal AM manufacturing facilities. Commenting on the further potential of AM, Haller stated, “When designers can think differently without restraints, that’s when additive can really take off.”
GE’s mission to educate the designers of the future GE Additive’s drive to raise awareness of AM through Industry in 3D is part of a wider mission to ensure that AM is firmly on the agenda of the current generation of design and engineering students. Through its Additive Education Program (AEP) the company has made a significant financial commit-
Metal Additive Manufacturing | Summer 2018
ment to, over a five year period, invest in educational programmes to deliver AM systems to colleges and universities around the world. Now in its second year, the AEP has awarded polymer 3D printers and curricula to more than 1,000 primary and secondary schools in fifty US states and more than thirty countries, and metal Additive Manufacturing systems to a total of thirteen colleges and universities worldwide. The company recently concluded its AEP for 2018/19 by announcing the five universities in Europe and the United States that will each receive a Concept Laser Mlab 200R metal AM machine. These laser-based systems, worth a combined total of more than $1.25 million, will be delivered in the first quarter of 2019 to Coburg University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Germany, University of Limerick, Republic of Ireland, Calhoun Community College, Alabama, USA, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA, and West Virginia University, USA.
© 2018 Inovar Communications Ltd
Vol. 4 No. 2