3D printed miniature jet engine reaches 33,000rpm

They built the engine over the course of several years to test the technology’s abilities. While a whole commercial aircraft engine was too complex for their working model, the GE team got plans for a simpler engine developed for remote control model planes and customised them.

According to one of the engineers: “We wanted to see if we could build a little engine that runs almost entirely out of additive manufacturing parts. This was a fun side project.”

Once finished, the engine was mounted inside a test cell typically used to try out full-scale engines. Watch the video below to see the test.

Parts are typically cut out of larger pieces to get to a finished shape in traditional manufacturing, creating significant amounts of waste. Whereas additive manufacturing uses lasers to fuse thin layers of metal on top of each other to build parts from the ground up. This allowed the team to create more advanced and better optimised parts, as well as to reduce the amount of material waste.

“There are really a lot of benefits to building things through additive. You get speed because there’s less need for tooling and you go right from a model or idea to making a part. You can also get geometries that just can’t be made any other way,” commented Matt Benvie, spokesman for GE Aviation.

Source: GEreports.