Industrial Automation Magazine India

Optomec delivers dollar1 mn metal additive system for production repair of turbines

Published on : Monday 18-10-2021

Long-standing multi-system customer expands capacity with latest machine improvements.

Albuquerque, N.M., October 2021 – Optomec announced the delivery of a multi-functional Additive Manufacturing (AM) machine to a leading supplier to the $37 billion worldwide aviation engine Maintenance Repair and Overhaul (MRO) market. The user is an existing customer with more than 5 Optomec Metal Additive systems being used in production to repair a range of turbine components from aircraft engines, as well as industrial gas turbines. The new machine combines two turbine repair process operations that are typically done manually, not only reducing the cost of engine overhauls, but also improving the quality and consistency of these flight-critical procedures.

Optomec’s Metal Additive repair solutions are the gold standard in the gas turbine industry and are currently used in high volume production in approximately 100 MRO installations worldwide. A single machine has the capacity to repair 10,000s of turbine blades annually, and together Optomec users having performed production repairs on more than 10 million components over time. The global fleet of 25,000 commercial aircraft and 50,000 military aircraft have a mandated time between overhaul (TBO) of around 5,000 flight hours, creating a large and growing demand for automated repair equipment. Optomec Additive Manufacturing systems are currently certified for aviation repair in 15 countries.

“There are really three advantages to using the Optomec AM process for repairing turbine components,” said Jamie Hanson, Optomec’s VP of Business Development. “First of all, it saves time and cost relative to manual repairs. Secondly, it requires far less heat input, so the base metal is far less affected by the repair. Finally, because the adaptive AM process adds less repair metal, the downstream machining costs are drastically reduced.”

Optomec’s Metal Additive Manufacturing machines use a process called Directed Energy Deposition (DED) to build 3D metal parts by deposing powdered metal into a precisely controlled pool of melted metal. Fiberoptic lasers supply the thermal power while advanced motion control systems produce the required geometries for the parts. Optomec leads the DED market with more than 200 DED machines in use.