The Right Stuff: New GE Advanced Manufacturing Plant to Make Next-Gen Ceramic Parts for Jet Engines
People have been using ceramics to store food, drink tea, and tile their homes for millennia. But GE engineers recently upped the ante and started putting high-grade ceramics inside jet engines. Their jet-age china is a light super material that combines silicon with ceramic-coated carbon fibers. It is tough enough to take the heat and forces inside a roaring jet engine and outperform even the most advanced steel alloys, a light enough to shave hundreds of pounds off a jet engine. “We are pushing ahead in materials technology, which gives us the ability to make jet engines lighter, run them hotter, and cool them less,” says GE Aviation manufacturing executive Michael Kauffman. “As result, we can make the engines, and the planes they’ll power, more efficient and cheaper to operate.”
