The ever increasing market of 3D Printing has got one more boost lately. According to a report, the engineers of General Electric Company (NYSE:GE) have created a fully functional jet engine with the help of 3D printing. It’s the first time when engineers have come up with a fully functional engine that is as small as a backpack with the help of 3D printed parts.
Things don’t end here- the team of scientists fired this newly built engine and took it as high as 33,000 RPMs to show the robustness of the engine parts.
Direct Metal Laser Sintering
It’s not an ordinary engine; hence, the technology used in building this engine is more advanced than the one used by engineers in building ordinary products through 3D printing. As per the reports, the jet engine was not printed with the latest markerBot model in ABS. Instead, engineers at GE took quite a few years using a latest technique called DMLS or Direct Metal Laser Sintering.
DMLS is a modern era technique in which a laser is focused on a fine-metal-particle bed to fuse and melt all the metals and create a desired object layer-by-layer. It may not be the fastest process in the world to create an object, but the parts created by it are as reliable and strong as those made through traditional machining or casting techniques.
The 3D printed jet engine is not a miniature and ordinary version of a completely blown jet engine, but a modified version of the engine design that is normally seen on RC Plane. This design is a lot simpler than the normal jet engines that are found underneath the wings of a 757 plane.
As soon as the researchers completed the manufacturing process and assembled it, the engine seemed very strong, and the initial tests proved them right. This finding of GE engineers has opened new doors for the high-end inventions in the 3D printing field.
