Voices Amplified: Jennifer Coyne Leverages Career in Rail Sector To Industrialize Additive
In 2008, Jennifer Coyne earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering at Grove City College in Pennsylvania while serving an internship at GE Transportation. After her hiring, she pursued a master’s degree in the same field from the Georgia Institute of Technology, all the while climbing the GE ladder to become a design engineer, senior systems engineer, then a global AM team lead for GE Transportation, which was soon acquired by Wabtec Corp.
During this time, Coyne held roles in locomotive traction, propulsion systems, on-shore wind and diesel engine emissions designs and energy storage reliability. She’s a graduate of GE’s Edison Engineering Development Program and oversaw the successful launch of more than 50 production AM parts and four 3D printing labs in the U.S. and India. She’s also led PLM (product lifecycle management) and MES (manufacturing execution system) software implementations, the second of these aimed specifically at AM.
Finally, Coyne is listed on eight U.S. patents, all related to making rail transportation safer and more efficient. Because of her extensive experience and contributions to the industry as a whole, she was named one of Railway Age’s Top Women in Rail for 2020, received the 2017 Women in Technology Award from GE Transportation, and took home the GE Transportation Innovation Engineering Award in 2013.
Today, Coyne’s the associate director of programs at The Barnes Global Advisors, whose mission is “to help industrialize additive manufacturing.” It’s there that she oversees project development and execution, much of which revolves around bringing traditional manufacturers into the AM space.
“We help companies learn about AM equipment and processes, qualify parts for end use and understand which ones are suitable candidates for the different additive technologies.”
The AM industry as a whole suffers from a lack of material data and established manufacturing criteria, leaving question marks about what these technologies produce or are capable of producing. In addition, the technology is quite complex, with numerous variables and process parameters that can affect the product outcome—something she refers to as “turning the knobs.” It’s for this reason among others that, when not busy helping clients industrialize their AM processes, Coyne also serves as an SME Additive Manufacturing Community Advisor.
“Manufacturers have the ability to adjust process variables on a layer-by-layer or feature-by-feature basis,” Coyne said. “This is a very powerful tool, but it can also make part qualification challenging. This more than anything remains one of the biggest hurdles to widespread AM adoption.”
Coyne has ample experience to tackle such issues, much of which comes from her time at GE Transportation. There, she and her team developed a tool that evaluated the different parts on a locomotive, ranking them by size, material, quantity and other criteria, giving her and her team a more effective means to separate the AM wheat from the chaff.
Still, it wasn’t easy, she said. “Oftentimes, the parts we looked at were designed and optimized for centuries-old manufacturing technology. It is rarely going to be cheaper or more efficient to make such parts using AM, so any selection tool is going to be very subjective, and will only show you whether a part can be 3D printed, not whether it should be 3D printed. At the end of the day, the best way to determine this is to understand the requirements. Let that drive the design, and then design for the process that you’re trying to use.”