3D printing automotive parts is not news, but this 3D printed titanium alloy wheel called HRE3D looks like the future. Tire manufacturer HRE went to GE's Additive AddWorks team to develop the first 3D printed titanium wheel. GE and its subsidiary Arcam have a broad understanding of 3D printing capabilities and limitations, and HRE knows better than anyone how to make good wheels.
3D printing saves raw materials because the wheels produced using 3D printing account for only 5% of the total material used, while waste using traditional forging technology accounts for 80%. When the wheel is forged, it is a large piece of metal weighing 100 pounds, usually aluminum. In order to obtain light and strong wheels, most materials have to be processed, so many materials are costly, because they cannot be the same way. reuse. Due to the amount of starting material required to make the wheels, forging one with titanium would be very expensive. Titanium has a strength / weight index and corrosion resistance that is significantly better than aluminum, so it is an ideal material for wheels.
3D printing modeling brings new degrees of freedom to HRE designers because they don't have to worry about overhangs, tool depth and cavities, and may even include interlaced scanning capabilities. The size limitation means that the spokes of the wheel are printed in multiple parts and then connected to unprinted carbon fiber wheels. But this is only temporary; GE will soon have a printer capable of producing the entire wheel as a single piece, further reducing time, saving weight and using less material.
Arcam's electron beam melting is one of the most energy-consuming additive manufacturing technologies, but it is also one of the coolest. This process is performed under high temperature vacuum to produce stress-relieving parts, which have better performance than cast metal and are actually comparable to forged metal. A powerful electron beam quickly melts the cross-section of the component onto a powder metal bed (in this case titanium), and a cross-section of each layer has a new layer of powder swept through the building area; each cross-section is sintered to the front by a beam One cross section, the beam can hold multiple molten pools. The part was eventually buried in powder and then blown clean, but almost all unsintered powder was reusable.