Clara Dilernia
GE Fuse team pic with credit
The GE Fuse team. From left to right: Amelia Gandara; Naveen Nair; Axel Grippo; Deborah Brown; and Claire Dickey, from GE Fuse's marketing team.
GE Fuse is among the latest in a long list of General Electric subsidiaries and sub-divisions. Founded in the late 19th century, the parent company that now oversees the likes of GE Aviation; GE Healthcare; GE Power; and since 2016, GE Additive, General Electric was born from a 1892 merger between Thomas Edison’s General Electric Company and the Thomas-Houston Electric Company, with the continued support of Drexel, Morgan & Co.
Drexel, Morgan & Co financed much of Edison’s research, and helped kickstart what is now one of the largest firms in the United States. Three years prior to the merger with Thomas-Houston, Drexel, Morgan & Co helped align Edison’s business interests in electrical manufacturing into one business. They again orchestrated the 1892 merger. And 125 years later, the resulting company’s reach extends to all four corners of the globe, and in as many vertical markets as you can think of.
Not long after GE’s commitment to additive manufacturing in the form of the GE Additive division, GE Fuse was launched, via GE Global Operation’s GENIUSLINK, to find solutions for clients with the help of crowdsourcing. As of August 2017, it is a team of just four people, but in its dependency on an open innovation platform, in which anybody is free to contribute ideas and concepts, it calls on the knowledge and thought processes of many more.
GE Fuse is open. Open to assisting clients in overcoming what it calls ‘challenges’ and open to listening to contributions from an array of people in order to do so. The team, the four of them that is, operates from a microfactory in Chicago. Axel Grippo is the General Manager of Fuse (for Oil & Gas); Amelia Gandara is the company’s Community Manager; Deborah Brown is the Rapid Prototyping Leader; and Naveen Nair, Fuse’s Technology Leader, completes the group. The latter three all have backgrounds in engineering, while Grippo’s forte is in financial analysis.
From within its microfactory, the team listens, deliberates, carries out, and refines proposed industrial inspection solutions to serve its clients. It rapid prototypes, conducts modular experimentation, and validates the results against the market.
Clara Dilernia
GE Fuse office credit
The GE Fuse microfactory.
“The model works to accelerate the product development process and so the prototyping is where we’re having some of the biggest cuts in development time because we’re able to work so quickly and have parts made in a way that you just previously couldn’t,” Gandara tells TCT.
“The process goes fast,” continues Brown, “and that works to bring solutions to the customer for their evaluation and say, ‘Is this what you want?’ So, before we spend hundreds of thousands in terms of development, we can make these quick turns and ask the customer ‘Are we in the right direction? Is this what you’re looking for? Will you find a benefit and it would help you?’”
GE Fuse harnesses 3D printing technologies for an efficient rapid prototyping process. Exactly which additive process they use is dependent on how detailed the prototype needs to be. Fused Deposition Modelling might be used for a basic model to make sure it can be handheld, for example, while a prototype might be printed in metal if the model is required in greater detail.
Fuse is also able to lean on the support of the wider internal GE community. Such is the growing interest within GE businesses in 3D printing, the providing of equipment and technical support is easy to come by. The GE community has sought some return on this support. So far, many of GE Fuse’s challenges have been set by other GE businesses. The first GE Fuse sponsor was GE Inspection Technologies, and soon after GE Aviation came to Fuse to partner on an inspection-related need. With GE Aviation, Fuse embarked on a challenge to explore a new method for inspecting jet engines, which would allow for repeatable, consistent images of the same engine. They are currently well into the prototyping phase, having crowdsourced an innovative idea.
The idea centres on the use of a J-tube with mounted flange on the top surface and a track for the borescope, the optical device used to inspect the engine. This allows for the insertion of the borescope into the engine to be done much easier and more consistently. Prototyping was done on a series of 3D printing platforms, going from plastic parts – ‘everything from the actual mechanism itself to the camera pieces’ – on a MakerBot, Stratasys Objet and EOS Formiga, to metal parts on a Concept Laser M2 machine.
In the making of the J-tube, a rare and complex component to manufacture, 3D printing would enable the Fuse team to prototype more efficiently. The part's thin walls and curved shape meant it was susceptible to collapsing. While printing with support structures meant a little more in the way of post processing, the quick turnaround overall allowed for designs to be tested and refined. Fuse reckoned if they were to approach the production of the J-tube with hydro-forming, for example, fixturing and welding would have to be factored into the process, and thus more time and money would have been spent.
GE Fuse
GE Fuse
The J tube at the centre of GE Fuse's Jet Engine Inspection challenge with GE Aviation.
For access to the 3D printing technology, Fuse has relied on the extensive supplies of the GE community. As seen by Fuse’s collaborations with other GE divisions, the team wants to scale the business across the entire GE spectrum, all parties on a project bringing something different to the challenge.
“It was really nice to take some CAD models, send it over to [other GE employees], and they have a wide variety of material that they can use to print and send back to us,” Brown says. “We’ve used a variety of resources, locally in Chicago, and via GE nationally. It is really nice that, in the 3D printing community today, there’s so many ways to go after these solutions.”
Gandara follows on: “The model scales. GE has a lot of different ways that it solves it problems currently. They’ve got hundreds of thousands of employees, so in some cases the problem can be solved by the brilliant people already working within GE in the engineering teams.”
When working on the jet engine inspection project, GE Fuse partnered with GE Aviation subject matter experts who have been by their side every step of the way. Other GE Aviation staff have also been in direct contact with Brown, refining an idea sourced digitally from an exterior online community at fuse.ge.com. GE Fuse has done the same in its Position Sensor Design; X-Ray Plate Adapter; and Speedy CT Image Delivery challenges.
It’s a modern concept, one that contradicts any headstrong attitude that could easily be held by a company of GE’s stature. Fuse sees the benefits in consuming different points of view, different opinions, and different ideas. It's often said two heads are better than one. By the same token, it appears hundreds of heads are better than four.
“It takes a lot of people to look at some of these problems but it also benefits from people from different industries looking at them,” said Brown. “We’ve got solutions or answers from people who are familiar with virtual reality, 3D space, the gaming industry, so we’re able to leverage some technologies from there and bring it into this inspection technology world.
“What we’ve found is that by having this cross-talk between different industries and different expertise, there’s a lot of ‘Oh we do this all the time over here, I never really thought about industrial inspection, but I guess we can use it over there’. So, industrial inspection is a really cool place to be, bringing in those technologies, and leveraging them in these specific applications.”
“Yeah, if you think of that,” Gandara adds, “some of the technologies we use in inspection like X-ray and CT came from the healthcare space so there’s a strong belief that there’s a way to leverage technology’s that exist in healthcare, maybe the automotive space, maybe in an industry we’re just not thinking about that can be applied to industrial inspection. That’s why we’re excited [about] Fuse.”
