I ask myself when will industry finally be ready for PrintRite3D? I hoping sooner than later. I just saw this article that mentions the need for faster AM printers and of course validation. Here's part of the article
Despite its benefits, additively manufacturing metal parts is far from a universal practice within the automotive sector. AM is well-suited for building complex metal parts, but the relative slowness and expense of the process makes its use impractical in an industry reliant on high-volume production.
“The cost of a 3D-printed component is driven by the speed at which it’s made,” said Adams. “So when you’re Toyota and you’re producing 50,000 Camrys a year, the numbers don’t currently make sense for any [3D printing] system on the market. The bottleneck would be the production of the part, even if there is a clear performance gain.”
Another limiting factor is build size. Most components in a vehicle that would be good candidates to print are fairly small, like seatbelt brackets, said Adams, “and you’re not gaining a lot of lightweighting performance with those smaller components.”
The biggest potential weight savings would come from 3D-printing things like wheels, brakes, and suspension components. “Because of the additional power needed to rotate the mass of those wheels, any gram of weight you save there is a huge advantage versus taking a couple pounds out of the body of a vehicle,” Adams noted.
But such large components are usually too big to fit into most traditional additive systems, and if they do, they take too long to print. However, with the advent of larger and more powerful metal 3D printers, automotive manufacturers will begin to print full-size metal components and reap economic rewards.
“With larger-scale, faster printers, build time is now one or two days, and we can get a 30% increase in performance along with a 30% decrease in weight off that component, which starts to tip the scales into value,” Adams said.
Another factor slowing implementation of additive in automotive production is the need for validation of printed parts.
additive manufacturing software nTopology software was used to lightweight and design an additively manufactured car brake pedal. During the design process, lattice elements were thickened where higher stresses develop. nTopology
“Automotive manufacturers building hundreds of thousands of cars and trucks need repeatability, and they’ve got to have the necessary safety factors relative to variabilities in real production,” said Bruce Colter, vice president and general manager of Spee3D North America, Benton Harbor, Mich.
The Australia-based company makes “cold spray” 3D printers that jet-spray powdered metal at Mach 3 speeds, so that kinetic energy bonds the particles and layers together—a technology originally used for repairing aircraft parts (see sidebar).
“Lots of lightweighting concepts exist for computer-generated designs that remove material in ways that can only be produced by AM,” Colter said. “However, these designs are questionable in the real world for repeatability and having the necessary safety factors for variations in real production and use.”
nTopology’s Harris noted, “If you’re buying metal off the shelf and then machining it, your metal is already characterized to have X strength and Y stiffness to some quality specification. But with additive, you are making the metal as you’re making the part, so the quality is a lot harder to characterize.
“A car company putting a part on a vehicle can’t afford to get it wrong, because a recall costs millions of dollars and chances are people are going to lose trust, which costs the company even more,” Harris said.
