It’s no secret that additive manufacturing (AM) has been gaining ground in defense in recent years, with numerous new machines, materials, and partnerships. From drones to small arms, defense use cases for AM are exploding, but there’s a tendency to talk about this sort of progress in generalities rather than specific examples.
Look, I’ve just done it!
One reason for this (and a persistent headache for marketers in the tech sector) is that if your product or solution is giving your customers a competitive edge, they’re not likely to want to share their secret sauce. Indeed, for every captivating case study I’ve come across, there are dozens of others that I can’t talk about without violating someone’s NDA.
So, what’s a humble senior editor to do?
Go straight to the source, of course!
I’d seen several recent announcements from major players referencing Beehive Industries, so I reached out to the company to learn more about how it’s using AM to gain an edge in defense manufacturing. I ended up sitting down with Gordie Follin, the company’s Chief Product Officer and an engineer with decades of experience in aerospace.
From GE to Beehive
After more than twenty years spent with industry titans, including GE Aerospace and Pratt & Whitney, Follin was no stranger to AM at scale. His time with GE included work on what he believes is the most additively enabled FAA-certified aircraft engine: the Catalyst. But FAA certification, as Follin acknowledges, is a recurring challenge for AM in production.
It’s one thing to certify a single-use application on a drone, but certifying a critical part for a manned aircraft is a considerably higher bar to clear. That’s why, when Follin left GE five years ago to join Beehive, defense wasn’t the latter company’s sole focus. The team looked at industrial gas turbines, solid and liquid rockets, even dental and medical devices. But, as Follin tells it, the numbers pointed to aerospace and defense as the best option.
“Additive allows you to optimize performance, weight, cost, and schedule,” Follin explains. “Normally, you have to pick two of those four things, but additive allows you to potentially go after all of them without sacrificing the others.” More importantly, if you look at where those trade-offs matter most, aerospace and defense come out on top.
From there, Beehive’s focus narrowed further to unmanned systems, a decision that dramatically simplifies the qualification process and lets the company move at an iterative pace that would be inconceivable in a manned aircraft program.
From demonstrator to Frenzy
As so often happens, Beehive’s flagship product—the Frenzy turbojet engine—wasn’t its first. Initially inspired in part by the X-61 Gremlin, Beehive built several demonstrator engines and tested them, which Follin says not only served as an important learning experience, but also helped the young company gain credibility.
“A lot of startups say they’re going to do stuff, but the truth is that a lot of them don’t,” he explains. “Building that engine on our own and taking it to customers really opened doors for us.”
From those early conversations with customers, Beehive identified a market opportunity in a smaller engine class, driven by funding opportunities from programs such as the Extended Range Attack Munition (ERAM) and the Family of Affordable Mass Missiles (FAMM). But while customers expressed enthusiasm for what Beehive was proposing, Follin says there was also concern that the company was too late to compete:
“Three years ago, they were saying, ‘We need something in three years but nobody can develop an engine that fast.’ But for the very first engine we built, we went from a clean sheet to a first engine test in seven months.”
As the Frenzy engine continued to advance—even performing well at high altitudes where small engines can struggle—the defense sector’s interest in Beehive Industries grew commensurately.
Additive manufacturing at Beehive Industries
At its inception, Beehive Industries was like many AM job shops: 3D printing parts for other industries on demand. In fact, the company still produces parts for the power generation industry, as well as for others in aerospace and defense. Moreover, while some of those parts are 3D printed directly using powder bed fusion, others are made via additive casting.
Rather than going through the traditional, multi-step wax-pattern process for casting turbine airfoils or fuel nozzles, Beehive 3D prints ceramic molds directly. As a result, Follin says they can deliver those cast parts in a fraction of the time needed for a conventional casting house. The company has also recently added metal pouring capabilities, giving Beehive the ability to make Frenzy engines either via AM or traditional casting, depending on which makes more sense as production scales.
According to Follin, the cast and printed units perform the same; the real differentiator is the unit cost from external vendors. “Right now, whether we print a turbine or cast a turbine, it costs us about the same,” he explains. “But the reason why it’s internally cost-neutral is because we’re not paying for any of the ceramic tooling or investment casting; if we were to buy a cast turbine from someone else, that’s going to be much more expensive than printing it ourselves.”
From a design perspective, Beehive has fully embraced design for additive manufacturing (DfAM), with engines built from an additive-first mindset. The result, says Follin, is that Frenzy doesn’t look like a conventional engine. “If we made that engine conventionally, it would probably be 400 parts,” he explains. “Our engine, including every bolt and washer, is like 40 parts. The turbomachinery is five parts, and that would normally be 200.” In short, Frenzy epitomizes the part-consolidation benefits that AM boosters have been touting for years.
“We have a center frame in the middle of the engine that has the diffuser from the compressor, the combustor case, the combustor liner, the bearing housings, the stage-one nozzle for the turbine, the fuel nozzles, and the fuel manifold,” Follin says. “All this is printed into this one part, which you could never make conventionally. It’s a beautiful part. If you’re an engineering geek, you’d say it should be in MoMA one day.”
What’s more, Beehive’s experience with AM means that the company’s engineers understand where and how to make trade-offs in operating efficiency. For example, rather than chasing efficiency by reducing the surface roughness of printed airfoils, Frenzy gets its efficiency by eliminating leakage paths and using more aerodynamic designs.
Of course, that’s not to say that AM has replaced machining entirely at Beehive. In cases where tolerances are extremely tight or stresses are extremely high—such as turbine blade tips or shaft interfaces, respectively—machining is still the best option. Follin is adamant, however, that printing a part to near net shape and then machining the whole thing to finish it is not the way to go. This is another reason Beehive’s focus on small engines for one-way trips pairs well with AM: those engines don’t need the same level of efficiency as engines that fly for thousands of hours. For this application, the gains from AM are impressive:
“At the end of the day, when we compare our engine to a conventionally made alternative, we’re 20-30% more efficient,” says Follin.
Challenges and the China question
Beehive Industries has been growing rapidly, hitting numerous important milestones in the last few years. While that’s undoubtedly a good thing for the company, it can also create novel challenges, the most significant of which is scaling. From people to facilities to production rates, a growing business needs to be able to scale up smoothly or risk becoming bogged down in bureaucracy and technical debt. One of the ways Beehive prepared for this was through what Follin calls manufacturing demonstrations, in which Beehive practiced printing a lot of engines in a limited amount of time—just one or two weeks—to prepare for the planned production ramp.
And now the real scaling is starting: Beehive expects to make hundreds of engines this year, several thousand in 2027, and perhaps as many as 10,000 the year after that. “We’re shipping multiple engineers per day at this point,” Follin says.
On the people front, Beehive Industries is looking for engineers with industry experience rather than those fresh out of school. “Generally, the people we hire are very strong in additive manufacturing, jet engines, or both,” Follin explains. That means drawing talent not only from aviation but also the space industry, industrial gas turbines, and other fields that nurture additive expertise. “With additive, the line between manufacturing and engineering is essentially zero,” Follin says. That’s one of the reasons the company involves machinists in its design reviews: to avoid falling into the trap of designing parts that can’t actually be made.
One last question I had to ask was about China. I’ve had a theory for a while now that the growth of AM in defense is being driven, at least in part, by the pressure of competition from Chinese additive OEMs, such as BLT and Farsoon. I asked Follin directly whether Beehive Industries would ever consider using a BLT or Farsoon printer, and his answer was unequivocal:
“For us, the question is less about the technical capability of the printer and more about data security. We work on military applications, so we will continue to use components manufactured in the United States or allied countries. There are ways information can leak when someone is servicing your printer, so we’re very careful about that. We won’t consider Chinese printers at this point because of what we’re working on. If we were printing jewelry, maybe that would be fine, but we’re not. The application shapes our process as much as anything.”
AM for defense done right
It’s hard to imagine a better example of what AM can do for defense than Beehive Industries. From its design process to its products to its approach to production, this is a company with 3D printing encoded in its DNA. Indeed, I’d go so far as to say that Beehive Industries wouldn’t exist in its current form without the enablement of additive technologies. If you’re wondering what the future of manufacturing in the defense sector more generally looks like, this is it.
The post This is how you do AM for defense appeared first on Engineering.com.