• Colantoni, Simone
• Soman, Abhimanyu
• Turco, Paolo Del
• Kemble, Simon
• Ceccanti, Filippo
• Delfino, Matteo

Abstract

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>Baker Hughes is providing gas turbine solutions and services across the world since 1950s. There are many legacy engines still working at customer sites requiring services every year. The different models/upgrades of Frame 3 and Frame 5 introduced to the market from 1950’s to 1990’s led to the existence of many parts resulting in complex supply chain management to maintain an active and high-quality production. This is true especially for the components which require an investment casting process, such as nozzle and blades. The investment casting tooling requires a minimum number of produced sets per year to ensure a high-quality production and so it needs to be re-qualified in case of low production. On the other side increasing the volume more than the requirements may lead to higher inventory management. In addition, conventional manufacturing processes need higher lead time to deliver the spare parts, that may cause the risk to not fulfill the customer expectations/needs. To avoid such challenges, additive manufacturing is introduced to move the manufacturing of service parts from external suppliers to inhouse, developing a full internal vertical capability through printing, post-processing, and final machining operations. This helps in improving the lead time as well as the part management and allowing the internal Product Leadership office to develop and speed-up the internal strategy for service parts. This paper explains the design considerations made during the introduction of additive manufacturing technology to produce nozzle spare parts for Frame 3 and Frame 5 machines. Material is selected for the printing, in such a way that the material property derived from a printed specimen is aligned or better than the material property of the original part. The design of the nozzles has been improved with changes at life critical locations, injecting the latest design technologies developed for new products inside the old nozzle layout and boundaries, taking advantage of huge fleet experience acquired in these years. The mechanical robustness of the innovative design has been verified according to the current analytical internal process and it has been proven through a field validation being several nozzles sets installed, operated, and inspected in Service fleet.</jats:p>

Topics

• impedance spectroscopy
• additive manufacturing
• aligned
• investment casting