GE has announced their use of a new form of additive 3D printing technology called EBM or Electron Beam Melting that can speed up the production time of printing metal components by as much as 10X over laser sintering technology.
As reported on their Tumblr they plan to use the technology to build turbine blades for jet engines:
As a result, one machine can produce eight stage 7 blades for the low pressure turbine that goes inside the GEnx jet engine in just 72 hours. “This is very competitive with casting, which is how we used to make them,” says Mauro Varetti, advanced manufacturing engineer at Avio.
Considering GE’s widespread manufacturing and R&D presence across multiple industries including Health Tech. I would expect to see this tech expand very rapidly.
With the pace of technology and the speed of innovation, perhaps the Six Million Dollar man may only be a few hundred thousand by the time he shows up on the scene.
While our little Afinia 3D Printer is pretty neat and can print a decent little prototype I can’t help but want to play with the big guns like this metal additive printer.