NACA inlet case summary. GE Additive General Atomics
NACA inlet case summary.
General Atomics Aeronautical Systems (GA-ASI) has successfully flown a metal additively manufactured part for the first time.
The company began working with GE Additive’s AddWorks consultancy arm in the spring of 2019, harnessing its expertise to train its staff in design for additive manufacturing (DfAM), enhance its knowledge of industrialisation process development and improve its understanding of materials validation in a bid to optimise part design and part qualification.
Within eight months, GA-ASI had performed the first test flight of a metal 3D printed part – a NACA inlet made in Titanium Ti6AI4V on a Sky Guardian Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPA) in February 2020.
The NACA inlet was highlighted early on in the application identification process as a ‘strong contender’ to be the first metal 3D printed part through the company’s Sky Guardian programme. Harnessing GE Additive’s Concept Laser M2 machine, GA-ASI and AddWorks were able to redesign the NACA inlet, previously made up of three parts welded together, into a single piece. This removed challenging tooling and inspection processes, while also delivering a 90% cost reduction per part, a weight reduction of more than 30% and a tooling reduction of approximately 85%.
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Elie Yehezkel, Senior Vice President of GA-ASI’s Advanced Manufacturing Technologies attends an executive review in December 2019.
“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,” commented Elie Yehezkel, Senior Vice President of Advanced Manufacturing Technologies at 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 additive manufacturing strategy and has also informed how we plan to approach a much wider application space already in the pipeline.”
The NACA inlet is now entering the final qualification phase after the successful test flight, while the GA-ASI team has already begun applying best practices and knowledge to the wider NACA inlet part family, as well as several other components and sub-systems. Additionally, GA-ASI has placed an order for multiple GE Additive Concept Laser M2 Series 5 machines, set to be installed at its new Additive Design & Manufacturing Center of Excellence in Poway, California later this year. The company believes the internal additive manufacturing capacity will help to serve application development and rapid reaction manufacturing.
GA-ASI will also likely continue working with AddWorks, who have been credited with accelerating and supporting the industrialisation process and production readiness of the NACA inlet, while also helping to reduce the qualification risks.
“We know first-hand that the ability to secure buy-in from multiple cross-functional stakeholders is often critical to the success of any metal additive programme within an organisation. 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,” offered Lauren Thompson, Operations Project Manager at GE Additive AddWorks and part of the team working with GA-ASI. “Combining our deep domain expertise of metal additive and best practices from our own additive journey with GA-ASI’s equally deep domain expertise of their RPA applications allowed us to move quickly and work within the timelines we had set.”
