Over the past few weeks, 3D printing has been used in automobiles for a wide range of applications, from Mercedes print replacement parts, to Bigrap 3D printed electric motorcycles, to 3D printed custom car wheels. A few years later, it was hard to believe that cars were made without 3D printers. In addition, there is a 3D-printed high-performance suspension from Carbon Performance for the Lotus Elise sports car.
RN Murugesan, director of Carbon Performance, said: "We are a true British company, fully focused on the vision of incorporating additive manufacturing into the automotive industry, and we are the world's first retail brand of automotive consumer products to use additive manufacturing." Consumers ’retail locations because they look beautiful on the shelf when packaging their parts, which is invisible to most auto parts companies.
Carbon Performance plans to use its 3D printing expertise to expand into graphene and smart and sustainable mobile solutions. By partnering with a company like Lotus, Carbon Performance can prove that 3D printing solutions can not only keep up with traditional manufacturing, but can also run around it.
Earlier, Antarctic Bear also reported that many sports car brands started using 3D printing technology, such as a 40 million yuan Bugatti-equipped 3D printed titanium brake caliper, and chose advanced 3D printing technology to produce the latest Chiron's latest brakes. Pliers to reduce the weight of the structure. Titanium, in contrast to aluminum, will be the largest brake caliper installed on a manufacturing vehicle, with eight titanium pistons on each front caliper and six titanium pistons on each rear caliper. The new bionic design combines minimum weight and maximum rigidity. It can withstand 125 kg of pressure per millimeter. The caliper weighs only 2.9 kg. The current weight of aluminum parts is 4.9 kg.
In addition, Bugatti Veyron used 3D printing on its Divo sports car to make taillights. Building on previous successes, advanced 3D printing technology was selected to produce the taillights of the new Divo supercar to reduce the weight of previous designs. The new taillights are made of lightweight 3D printed fins, of which 44 are lit to produce a striking effect. At the outer edges, the fins are wider to maximize light output.
3D printing technology has also been seen in the BMW i8. Lightweight brackets manufactured by powder bed metal 3D printing technology have also entered the mass production field with the mass production of the i8 Roadster.
Metal additive manufacturing has a history of more than 10 years, and BMW has been using it since the beginning of the technology. Within the BMW Group, there are experts with more than a decade of metal printing experience. Early experience mainly focused on design verification and functional testing. These early know how also brought accumulation for BMW to enter the series of small batch production.
A new technology starts with high-end consumer groups and then gradually applies to the mass consumer groups. This trend will continue in the automotive field. It is believed that 3D printing technology will be used in general automobiles in the future.