Additive Turbines
3D printed turbine blades and vanes
The bottleneck
12–18 months
For a single blade
Single-crystal turbine blades are cast by a handful of qualified foundries worldwide, through a process that has barely changed in decades. Demand from aviation, power generation and defense is outpacing that capacity — and lead times are getting longer, not shorter.
Single-crystal investment casting
- Hard toolingWax-pattern and core dies, machined to order — months before the first part.
- Ceramic coreCores moulded and fired to form the internal cooling passages.
- Wax patternWax injected around each core, then assembled into a cluster.
- Ceramic shellDipped and stuccoed coat after coat, drying between each.
- Dewax & fireWax melted out; the shell is fired to strength.
- Directional solidificationA single crystal grown through a grain selector in a vacuum furnace.
- Knockout & leachShell broken off; the core chemically leached out of the blade.
- Heat treatSolution and ageing heat treatment.
- InspectGrain etch, X-ray and orientation checks — around 30% are scrapped.
- Machine & drillRoot grinding and EDM-drilled cooling holes.
Additive Turbines
- Digital designStraight from the CAD model — no part-specific tooling.
- PrintQuasi-single-crystal blades with cooling passages built in.
- Depowder & plate removalLoose powder removed and parts cut free of the build plate.
- Heat treat & finishPost-build heat treatment, then surface finishing to reduce surface roughness.
- Machine mating surfacesOnly the mating surfaces are finish-machined — no cooling-hole drilling.
- Inspect & shipInspected and on its way.
Lead time
From design to hardware
in two months
No dies, no wax patterns, no ceramic cores. We print blades and vanes directly from the digital model — collapsing more than a year of supply chain into weeks, and turning design iterations from annual events into routine ones.
Cost
10×
An order of magnitude less per part
Casting carries the cost of hard tooling, scrap from grain defects, and low-volume economics that never improve. Additive builds over a hundred blades on a single plate with no part-specific tooling — so cost scales with material and machine time, not with the foundry queue.
Material
Single-crystal strength
Without the casting
Our proprietary process parameters drive directional, quasi-single-crystal grain growth layer by layer — delivering strength comparable to conventionally cast single-crystal superalloy blades.
Columnar grains run the full span, all within a few degrees of ⟨001⟩.
Directional growth
Grains aligned along the blade axis, the direction that matters most under centrifugal load.
Proprietary parameters
Process windows developed in-house to suppress stray grains and control crystallographic texture.
Comparable performance
Mechanical properties benchmarked against conventional single-crystal cast blades.
Yield
Roughly one in three castings is scrapped
Single-crystal casting is unforgiving. A stray grain, a freckle chain or a shifted core condemns the part — and it only shows once the mould is broken open. Scrap rates run around 30%, and every rejected blade sends its cost and its lead time back to the start of the queue.
Additive manufacturing is digitally controlled and repeatable: the same file, the same toolpath and the same process parameters on every build. That consistency brings the scrap rate down to around 1%.
Scrap rate
Outcome per 100 parts, approximate
Additive Turbines
~1%scrapped
Single-crystal casting
~30%scrapped
- Pass inspection
- Scrapped
| Process | Pass inspection | Scrapped |
|---|---|---|
| Additive Turbines | 99 | 1 |
| Single-crystal casting | 70 | 30 |
Same file, every build
Every blade is printed from the same digital model, toolpath and process parameters.
No moulds, no cores
Shell cracks, core shift and core breakage — common casting rejects — have no equivalent in a printed part.
Predictable output
When the process repeats, so does the yield — every build plate delivers what was planned.
Cooling
Cooling, built in
Internal cooling passages are printed directly into the blade — geometries a ceramic core can’t form. Thermal management is designed in from the start, and the drilling and machining operations that follow every single-crystal casting simply go away.
Printed passages
Serpentine channels, turbulators and lattices formed in the same build as the blade.
No EDM drilling
Cooling features are produced in the part, not added afterwards.
Fewer process steps
Eliminating secondary machining removes cost, lead time and scrap risk.
Made in America
Built in the
United States
Every Additive Turbines blade and vane will be made in the USA, with a focus on rapid deployment — a domestic source for hot-section hardware that reaches the engine makers, MRO shops and defense programs that depend on it in weeks, not years.
Domestic supply
A U.S. source for critical turbine hardware, independent of overseas foundry capacity.
Rapid deployment
Printed on demand and shipped domestically — hardware where it’s needed, when it’s needed.
Close to the customer
Short supply lines to American OEMs, MRO providers and defense programs.
The hot section,
rebuilt
In partnership with engine OEMs, MRO providers and investors, we’ll build additively manufactured blades and vanes for both the hot section and the compressor.