General Electrics has opened a new factory in South Carolina. The new factory should serve as bridge between lab and reality and allow faster creation of different prototypes.
Only a short time ago, one of the biggest competitors of General Electric (GE) – Siemens – has opened a new factory for 3D printing. Now General Electric opens an even more expensive factory: They invested 75 million Dollar in their new plant. Of cause there is only the most modern and best technology inside and 80 employees have the chance to work in the great factory. But not only employees work there, they have also a robot. To “see” the robot uses LIDAR – that’s the same technology that’s used in self driving cars.
They will use a punch of different 3D printers that can print nearly everything imaginable out of different materials. Amongst other things they have a 3D printer that can print ceramic matrix composites that are baked in an oven after printing. Parts with this material should have similar mechanical stability as metal and also some other advantages.
We were able to run through 10 design iterations in just a few months and then ship the final version into production four months later. Normally it would take us a year.
With the new factory it will be possible to create prototypes faster. The prototypes can then be tested faster and the finished product can be sold faster to the customer. But why this hurry? Because time matters, when they develop and test too slowly, it’s possible that a competitor sells a similar product and the own development was needless.
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