General Electric Company

General Electric has won the 2019 Corporate Technical Achievement Award for the development and commercialization of ceramic matrix composites (CMCs) in aircraft engines.

Higher temperature materials are a critical enabler for improving the overall performance and efficiency of advanced turbomachinery in both jet engines and gas turbines.  Intense research into superalloys over the past 40 years has resulted in an additional 300F of capability and their successful use at temperatures near their melting point.  Ceramics offer the ability to leapfrog 40 years of superalloy research with an additional 300F of capability, but traditionally have been challenged by poor mechanical toughness.  That barrier has been overcome with the introduction of GE’s CMCs.

CMCs offer the high-temperature capability of ceramics, while exhibiting the durability of metals.  As a result, engines can run hotter with less cooling required to prevent those materials from melting.  These factors have enabled them to deliver higher thrust, with lower emissions and fuel burn.

GE’s CMC entered commercial service, in August 2016, as high-pressure turbine (HPT) stage 1 shrouds on CFM International’s LEAP engine.  (CFM International is a 50/50 joint company between GE and Safran.)  Since entering into service, LEAP engines have accumulated over 3.5MM hours and 1.4MM flight cycles in revenue service.  The GE9X engine enters service in 2020 and will have five CMC components – combustor inner liner, combustor outer liner, HPT stage 1 nozzles, HPT stage 1 shrouds, and HPT stage 2 nozzles.

Early work on this CMC system started at GE’s Research Center in Upstate New York, nearly 30 years ago, with the vision to achieve at least a 300F higher operating temperature over the most advanced nickel superalloys and at one-third the weight.  The SiC-fiber, SiC-Si melt-infiltrated matrix, uniaxial architecture CMC concept progressed to become a commercial reality with each successful test engine demonstration.  Altogether, engineers from 4 GE divisions advanced the material from concept to product commercialization – Research, Aviation, Gas Power, and Oil & Gas.  Early development was funded by the United States Department of Energy and was focused on the use of CMCs in land-based gas turbines.  By 2000, the program had achieved its 1^st demonstration with CMCs in a 2MW Oil & Gas turbine.  Subsequently, high-temperature, long-duration evaluations were completed on three different customer serving F-class gas turbines between 2002 and 2014 – logging over 30,000 hours of operation and generating more than 5B kWhr of electricity.

Over the years other government agencies have supported the development of CMCs, including the Air Force, Navy, and NASA.  Beginning in 2007, GE’s Aviation business dramatically accelerated development and investment.  Since that time, GE has invested over $1.5B in the technology and has built out a large, vertically integrated supply chain across 5 manufacturing sites: Newark, DE, Asheville, NC, Huntsville, AL, Toyama, Japan (NGS JV with Nippon Carbon Company, GE, and Safran), Duncan, SC (Advanced Ceramics Coatings JV with Turbocoating Corp).

GE Aviation recently shipped its 50,000^th LEAP shroud and is producing shrouds at a rate of one every 12 minutes.  With a backlog of over 16,300 LEAP engines valued at more than $230B at list prices and over 700 9X engines valued at more than $30B at list prices, GE’s ceramic manufacturing engineers have years of work ahead of them.  As the cost to manufacture CMCs continues to decrease, GE is revisiting the application of CMCs in large-industrial-gas-turbines and beginning to explore other future CMC applications in reusable space and hypersonics.

About General Electric: The General Electric Company (“GE”) is one of the world’s premier industrial companies, imagining things others don’t, building things others can’t and delivering outcomes that make the world work better. With a large global footprint in the energy, aviation and healthcare industries, GE is inventing the next industrial era to move, power, build and cure the world. www.ge.com