TECH FRONT Long tested in GE’s own manufacturing sites, the technol-
ogy is ready for the open market, Potvin said. “We are ac- tively looking for licensing partners/early adopters,” he said. GE sees Blue Arc as a licensable technology to third-party machine manufacturers. GE partnered with Mitsui Seiki, the Japanese machine
builder, to come up with a five-axis, horizontal machining center with a Blue Arc head attached, starting in 2011. It is built in Japan, and GE has on display in Michigan a
prototype machine. The machine does not include the A axis. The Blue Arc on display in Michigan has 4000 A for its power supply and up to 30 V DC. It’s a hybrid machine: It can do conventional and nonconventional machining at the same workholding place. If a manufacturer needed to do roughing because it wanted to remove a lot of material from a tough alloy, it could, say, take 95% of the material off of the block with which it started—and then take care of finishing without re- moving the workpiece. The machine in Michigan has 120 tool
cartridges in an onboard magazine. It changes from Blue Arc to conventional machining by simply removing the Blue Arc head—via a robot—and putting in its place a conventional, multiple-point cutting tool. The machine in Michigan employs a FANUC robot, as well as a FANUC CNC 30-series control. The process is like reverse welding. “Instead of adding material, we are removing material through an arc process that melts material,” Potvin said. Blue Arc can eliminate “a really big, high-powered machine and expensive cutting tools” and replace it with a machine that has a much smaller footprint, Potvin said. The overall machine footprint can be reduced by 20–50% compared to a conventional roughing machine that would have capability to remove material at the same rate of a Blue Arc-enabled machine, he added. That is because Blue Arc’s low force means it does not need to be as rigid for higher material-removal rates. Because it uses no- and low-force technology, it can be used for cutting unique geometries. Dif- ficult to reach, deep cuts and very thin cuts are its forte.
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