Ever heard of General Electric? It's one of the largest companies in the world. Chances are there's a few things around your house designed and manufactured by GE, and now you have the chance to design a GE product of your own.
We're very excited to announce that GE has paired up with GrabCAD to give the open engineering community the chance to design a critical aircraft engine component. Today more and more companies are using additive manufacturing to lift constraints of traditional manufacturing processes, giving designers the ability to grow practically any shape, enabling the use of fully optimized lightweight designs that do not sacrifice performance.
Greg Morris, Strategy and Business Development for Additive Technologies at GE, said, "GE is always looking for new ways to bring great ideas to life, and we're excited to tap the creativity and skills of GrabCAD and NineSigma’s significant membership databases. New approaches, including additive manufacturing and crowd-sourcing design concepts, are just a few of the ways we are accelerating our design process.”
GE’s focus on additive technologies is part of its continued leadership in advanced manufacturing. GE is the world’s largest user of additive technologies in metals, with a full-scale additive manufacturing facility in Cincinnati, Ohio, and a global team of 600 engineers, spread across 21 sites. Companywide, GE invests $6 billion in R&D.
The part
Loading brackets on jet engines play a very critical role: they must support the weight of the engine during handling without breaking or warping. The brackets may be used only periodically, but they stay on the engine at all times, including during flight.
This Challenge will have TWO phases:
PHASE I:
Submit an improved design based on the provided diagram and specs from June 12 to July 26. These designs will be analyzed and evaluated via simulation with the top ten designs awarded $1,000 each.
PHASE II:
The top ten optimized engine bracket designs from Phase I will then be additively manufactured and subjected to a given loading scenario. The top 8 designs will receive a total of $20,000 in additional prizes. Phase II will run from August 15 to November 15.
