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The oil embargo of 1973 was a dark and miserable period when American towns banned Christmas lights to save electricity, billboards urged citizens to “turn off the damn lights,” and filling stations dispensed gasoline “by appointment only” to “regular customers.” But like the Sputnik launch 15 years before, the crisis forced the government and many businesses to innovate their way out of the crisis.
GE, for example, focused on a class of multi-layered high-tech materials called composites. These materials are made from alternating layers of fiber and sheets of carbon, plastic or ceramics, kind of like industrial-grade baklava. When joined together, composites can be tougher and lighter than steel or titanium. “This was a huge, expensive and risky project,” says Shridhar Nath, who leads the composites lab at GE Global Research. “We planned to replace titanium with what is essentially plastic. We were starting from scratch and we did not know how carbon fiber blades would respond to rain, hail, snow and sand, and the large forces inside the engine.”
The bet paid off and GE has, over time, invested billions more in materials science. The composites research delivered a new line of large, fuel efficient jet engines like the GE90 and GEnx, that changed the economics of aviation forever. “The engines essentially opened the globe up to incredibly efficient, twin-powered, wide-body planes,” says David Joyce, president and CEO of GE Aviation.
The latest engine in that family, the GE9X, will power Boeing’s next-generation 777X long-haul jets. Light-weight carbon composites allowed engineers to design an 11-foot fan that can suck a maelstrom of 8,000 pounds of air per second inside the engine. The air will flows into the combustor, where it meets parts made from ceramic matrix composites (CMCs), another breakthrough material developed by GE scientists.
Carbon fiber composites work with cold air at the front of the engine. But CMCs operate in the engine’s hot section, at temperatures where even metals grow soft. The extra heat gained by the ceramics gives the engine more energy to work with and makes it more efficient.
But that’s not all. CMCs also have twice the strength and just a third of the weight of their metal counterparts. This allows designers to make parts from them thinner and much lighter, further reducing the weight of the engine.
While the GE9X is still in development, the new LEAP jet engine is the first passenger jet engine with CMC parts that’s already going through testing. Although the first LEAP won’t enter service until next year, it is already the bestselling engine in GE history, with $96 billion (U.S. list price) in orders.
The demand is so big that GE just decided to build a second plant for making ceramic jet engine parts, even though the first one is still under construction. Says GE researcher Krishnan Luthra, who spent two decades developing the material: “I thought it would be the Holy Grail if we could make it work.”
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Following the oil crisis, GE joined NASA’s quest to develop an energy-efficient engine for commercial aircraft. Known as E-cubed, the 1980s program helped GE develop the experimental GE36 unducted turbofan engine with carbon composite propellers.
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The engine used carbon fiber composite blades and a hybrid design combining turbofan and turboprop engines. It demonstrated fuel savings of more than 30 percent compared with similar-sized jet engines with conventional fan systems.
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Fuel prices dropped again and the GE36 never became a commercial engine. But GE used the technology for making carbon fiber composite blades for its next big engine, the GE90.
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GE Aviation’s CEO Brian Rowe led the GE90 development. GE launched the engine in 1991. It was the first commercial engine to use blades made from a carbon fiber composite in the front fan. The engine powers Boeing’s long-rage 777 planes.
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With a fan that’s 128 inches in diameter, the GE90-115B is also the world’s largest and most most powerful passenger jet engine, according to Guinness World Records. It produced 127,900 pounds of thrust, 50,000 pounds more than the rocket that took Alan Shepard to space. Its thrust can make rocks fly at GE’s jet engine testing base in Victorville, Ca.
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New York’s Museum of Modern Art acquired a carbon composite fan blade from the GE90 for its architecture and design collection.
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In 1998, GE used CMCs for the first time inside the F414 supersonic jet engine developed for the U.S. Navy’s F/A-18 Super Hornet. This image shows the fighter jet breaking through the sound barrier. Photo credit: Jarod Hodge, U.S. Navy.
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In 2004, GE started developing the GEnx jet engine for the Dreamliner and the redesigned Boeing 747-8 aircraft. Advances in composites research allowed designers to build the engine with just 18 composite fan blades, 4 fewer than the GE90. For the first time, the engine also had a carbon fiber composite fan case. Together, the design changes shaved hundreds of pounds off the engine and made the Boeing planes more fuel efficient. Above: A GEnx at a test stand in Peebles, Ohio.
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In 2007, GE Aviation acquired a ceramic composites plant in Newark, Delaware. It used the plant as a “lean laboratory” for testing the mass production of CMCs. Few scientists in the world had more experience with the materials. In 2003, after the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, scientists at the facility helped develop ceramic patches to repair the shuttle fleet in space. Photo credit: NASA
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By 2009, GE engineers could run parts made from CMCs in the hot section of any jet engine. Above: The F414 engine on an assembly line.
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The first Dreamliner powered by a GEnx jet engine entered commercial service in 2012. That year GE also started building in Ellisville, Miss., its second plant for manufacturing carbon fiber composites. The company also expanded production at CFAN, its original carbon composites factory, joint-venture built with France’s Snecma.
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GE is manufacturing an entire engine, the LEAP (above), in a joint-venture with Snecma. The LEAP will be the first commercial engine with CMC parts. The first assembled LEAP is already powering through tests.
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GE will also use ceramic parts and fourth-generation carbon fiber composites for the GE9X, the successor to the GE90. The engine will power Boeing’s next-generation 777X jet. The engine is still in development, but the company has already received 600 orders. The demand has pushed GE to open a second factory for CMCs in the U.S.
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With 132 inches in fan diameter, the GE9X will be even larger than the GE90 (above, a paper model made by Luca Iaconi Stewart). It will also be 10 percent more fuel efficient and produce 30 percent fewer emissions than the older engine. The latest carbon composite technology also brings down the number of fan blades to just 16, that’s 6 fewer than the original GE90. That’s impressive, but GE researchers are far from finished.