GE additive manufacturing lab to focus on accelerating the technology with potential customers

GE (Boston, MA) is developing its Center for Additive Technology Advancement (CATA; Pittsburgh, PA) into an externally focused Customer Experience Center (CEC) to accelerate the use of additive manufacturing with the company's customers across several industries.

Related: GE opens first additive manufacturing center in Pittsburgh region

With this transition, the $39 million technology center, which opened in April 2016 to drive additive manufacturing within GE industrial operations, now joins a global network of CECs under the growing umbrella of GE Additive.

In April 2017, GE Additive announced the creation of a CEC in Munich, Germany, to allow current and potential customers to experience firsthand designing and producing components using additive manufacturing.

Like the Munich site, the Pittsburgh site will operate additive machines from Concept Laser (Lichtenfels, Germany) and Arcam (Mölndal, Sweden)—both additive manufacturing providers in which GE has majority ownership. The Pittsburgh center will augment the operations already within both Arcam and Concept Laser operations in the United States, including Arcam's Orthopedic Center of Excellence (Shelton, CT).

The additive manufacturing machines at the Pittsburgh CEC will feature GE's cloud-based Predix operating platform to enable industrial-scale analytics and GE Edge devices, which provide real-time control and monitoring.

While the 50 employees at the Pittsburgh center will continue to support GE's industrial businesses with additive manufacturing initiatives, they will expand their focus to support current and potential Concept Laser and Arcam customers in additive manufacturing design and production. Customers will benefit from hands-on training and instruction at the facility, covering additive manufacturing design, machine operations, and support.

For more information, please visit www.geadditive.com.