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Next year, jet engine maker GE Aviation will launch the new commercial engine LEAP, which will contain two industry firsts: an additively manufactured part in a critical area as well as materials made from ceramic matrix composites.
In this one-on-one interview with Jon Blank, chief of engineering for GE Aviation's CMC laboratory in Evendale, Blank explained what ceramic matrix composites are and why they're such a big deal.
Essentially, composites such as concrete are a material made up from a combination of various other materials.
Q: Tell me about this new laboratory and what you do there.
A: "When you look at how to scale a process, to do it appropriate and reduce risk along the way, you need to play by what the chemical engineers say is a rule of 10. If you take something and you scale it up 10 times the amount and volume that you were doing before, you're probably okay… You can probably do that in one step. But if you decide to go, for example, 20 times the amount of volume, you're going to run into issues."
“Things do not scale that easily.”
“We have a facility here in (Evendale) that allows us to work closely as an engineering and a supply chain team to not only design but also build these components and then test them very quickly so we learn what are the pluses, what are the minuses, what are the concerns, what are the strengths of this material system.”
“We come up with the recipe of what this material will be, how we’ll manufacture it, how it’ll look, how it’ll feel and we transfer that to Newark in Delaware. That facility then takes what we provide them and looks at how do they further scale it to a full production scale.”
Q: What are CMCs, are there different types of CMCs and are there different types of composites?
A: "A simple way to think about it is a cold composite and a hot composite. The cold composite is used at the front of the engine; it's when you look at the front of the engine and you see these big fan blades, those would be your cold composites. Those are your carbon composites. The carbon is typically your fiber that you're using in the composite to make it."
“The hot composites, those are your CMCs, your ceramic matrix composites. There’s two major ones that people use out there. One… which is an oxide fiber with an oxide matrix…”
“The one that we’re using more and more on the LEAP engine, the GE9X engine which is our 777x engine, that one is a silicon carbide fiber with a silicon fiber matrix.”
“If you start with your… cold-based composite, those are typically used at temperatures that run up 500 degrees (Fahrenheit).”
“Oxide CMCs are used at higher temperatures, more in the 1,500, 1,600, 1,700 Fahrenheit type of degree and it can go a little hotter and of course it can go a little less.”
“Your silicon carbide CMC is used in the 2,000 Fahrenheit plus range temperatures.”
Q: What makes it so revolutionary?
A: "When you think of the Wright brothers when they started, they started with wood."
“The real revolutionary next step was taking wood and making planes out of metal. What it allowed them to do was to go higher, to travel faster, to travel longer, to travel more efficient, to carry more capacity and overall they had more capability.”
“It’s the same analogy for CMCs. It’s the next step in this revolution of materials for this industry because in the hot section of the engine, this will give you the reduced weight, it will give you the higher temperature capability, but it will also reduce the amount of cooling air that you require in there.”
“… We believe that the number of engine cycles that we can get out of a CMC component exceeds what the metal equivalent will be and that’s based off of actual testing that we’ve done.”
Q: Can you additively manufacture CMCs?
A: "Can you do it? Yes. Now the question you would ask is where have you done it? And we would say in a lab. It's nowhere ready for prime time."
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