Aviation Week & Space Technology - 30 March-12 April 2015

68 AVIATION WEEK & SPACE TECHNOLOGY/MARCH 30-APRIL 12, 2015 AviationWeek.com/awst

O

ne man’s pivotal role in General Electric’s industry-lead-

ing push into additive manufacturing is recognized with

the 2015 Aviation Week Laureate for Technology. Greg Mor-

ris, GE Aviation’s general manager for additive technologies,

started the manufacturer on a decade-long

journey that has brought 3-D printing into

the heart of its latest engines.

Morris Technologies, a Cincinnati-based

rapid prototyping company formed in 1994

by Greg and Wendell Morris and Bill Noak,

began working with polymer 3-D printing.

But in 2003 they saw the future in metal ad-

ditive manufacturing and became the first

company in the U.S. to own a direct metal

laser sintering (DMLS) machine from Ger-

many’s EOS.

GE was an early customer for Morris. To-

gether they embarked on a journey leading

to the large-scale industrialization of metal

additive manufacturing to produce more

than 40,000 fuel nozzles a year by 2020 for

the CFM International Leap-1 engine powering the Airbus

A320neo and Boeing 737MAX and the Boeing 777X’s GE9X.

A breakthrough came in 2005, when Morris and GE dem-

onstrated that highly finished components could be produced

from cobalt-chrome superalloy using DMLS. Initially the pro-

cess was used to make high-pressure turbine blades for test

engines, which could be produced more quickly than castings

but did not need to last more than a few hundred hours.

Then, Morris says, GE took the “very entrepreneurial”

decision to use the technology for fuel nozzles in production

engines. Previously, these complex nozzles comprised many

small parts painstakingly brazed together. Additive allowed

GE to go directly from computer-aided design screen to a

one-piece finished part that is lighter as

well as more efcient and durable.

By the time use of additively manufac-

tured fuel nozzles in the Leap became

public, the technology had 10 years of ex-

perimentation and qualification behind it,

and GE was five years ahead of its rivals,

Morris says. In 2012, GE acquired Morris

Technologies and co-founder Greg Morris

turned his attention to adapting additive

manufacturing for large-scale production.

Three other strong finalists were nomi-

nated for the Technology Laureate: Mitre

Corp. for leading a team that deployed an

FAA-approved ground-based sense-and-

avoid system at Canon AFB, New Mexico,

allowing USAF unmanned aircraft to fly in

civil airspace; Rockwell Collins for the MultiScan ThreatTrack

weather radar, with its ability to predict turbulence levels; and

the Naval Air Warfare Center and Qinetiq for the Magic Carpet

guidance system that uses digital flight control technology to

make aircraft-carrier landings easier, safer and more accurate. c

LAUREATES 2015

Technology

Innovation

CHRIS ZIMMER PHOTOS

Advantage: Additive

Two Paths to the GaN Goal

Aviation Week Managing Editor

Graham Warwick (left) presented

the Technology Laureate to GE

Aviation’s Greg Morris.

Aviation Week Managing Editor Gra-

ham Warwick (far left) presented the

Innovation Laureate to (right to left)

Tobias Persson and Peter Andersson

of Saab, and Colin Whelan and Michael

Borkowski of Raytheon.

I

n an unusual move, the 2015 Aviation Week Laureate for

Innovation goes to two companies for essentially the same

achievement, but one they reached via diferent routes. Ray-

theon and Saab are recognized for bringing gallium nitride

(GaN) power electronics to military

radar and electronic-warfare systems.

GaN-based transmit/receive modules

are more power-efcient than the gal-

lium arsenide devices in today’s active,

electronically scanned arrays (AESA)

because they can be run at higher volt-

ages without overheating. The result—

more power and less noise, for increased

range and sensitivity, in radars and jam-

mers that can be more affordable and

reliable.

For Raytheon, having its own foundry

to produce GaN devices has been key in

several program wins. These include

contracts to develop the Air and Mis-

sile Defense Radar for the U.S. Navy’s

Aegis destroyers and the Next-Gen Jam-

mer pod for its Boeing EA-18G Growler

electronic-attack aircraft. Raytheon was

also selected to develop the U.S. Air Force’s GaN-based Three-

Dimensional Expeditionary Long-Range Radar, in a competi-

tion now being revisited after a protest.

By tapping into the fast-moving commercial electronics

market, where GaN devices are entering production for

mobile communications, Saab expects to begin delivering

Girafe air-defense radars with the new technology as soon

as 2016. GaN AESAs will be used in the electronic-warfare

system of the new JAS39E Gripen fighter under development

at Saab. And the technology is likely to be featured in future

upgrades of its EriEye airborne warning and control sys-

tem. The Swedish company does not

have a GaN foundry, but instead has

the commercial industry produce its

integrated-circuit designs.

The other strong contenders for the

Innovation Laureate were South Afri-

ca’s Paramount Group, for developing

the first fully indigenous African-de-

signed and -built military aircraft—the

twin-boom, pusher-propeller Ahrlac, or

Advanced High-Performance Recon-

naissance Light Aircraft, which began

test flights in 2014.

Rockwell Collins was tapped for ex-

panding its Pro Line Fusion avionics

system, developed for business and

commercial aircraft, into military plat-

forms and unmanned aerial systems.

Textron’s innovation in business se-

cured it a finalist slot thanks to its bold

private-venture development of the Scorpion military light-

attack/recon aircraft, as well as acquisitions that led to forma-

tion of Textron Aviation and TRU Simulation & Training. c