Transforming the Automotive Industry With 3D Printing

New, resilient materials are giving opportunities to produce high precision, available 3D prints that can substitute for final parts and offer customization chances and high performance, but that's just the beginning.

Fremont, CA: Read on to find five essential means 3D printing is energizing innovation across the automotive industry, from design to manufacturing and beyond.

1. Remodeling the Prototyping Process

Prototyping has formerly been the most general use case for 3D printing in the automotive industry. Thanks to the immensely increased speed at which prototyping can be carried out through 3D printing, rapid prototyping has turn virtually synonymous with 3D printing, and the technology has reformed the product development process.

With 3D printing, automotive designers can rapidly fabricate a prototype of a physical part or assembly, from a simple interior element to a dashboard or even a scale model of a total car. Rapid prototyping allows companies to shift ideas into convincing proofs of concept. These ideas can then be advanced to high-fidelity prototypes that closely match the result and ultimately guide products using a series of validation stages toward mass production. In the automotive industry, this quick validation is vital.

Prototyping used to be time-consuming and potentially expensive as a product goes through more iterations. With 3D printing, extremely convincing and delegated prototypes can be created within a day at a much lower cost. Desktop 3D printers enable engineering and design teams to bring the technology in-house to increase iteration cycles and reduce the distance between idea and final product, reinforcing their overall product development workflows.

2. Creating Custom, Complex, and High-Performance Parts

3D printing is perfect for producing custom parts at significantly reduced expense, empowering manufacturers with vast new capabilities in what they can produce and offer to their customers.

For smaller companies who post "custom" at their core—such as the custom car shop Ringbrothers—3D printing car parts has provided ways of pushing the quality and creativity of their work, offering vital room to experiment with and perfect custom designs excluding worry for the potential expense and time-intensive manufacturing processes that otherwise come with customization.

3D printing applications are not restricted to classics and concept or exhibition models. Twikit's customization software has permitted British automaker MINI to provide mass personalization services for their cars using 3D printing, giving buyers full control over design. Customers can customize their vehicle's inner or outer components with various fonts, patterns, and images and review their design using 3D visualizations. Eminently, for the market viability of such a project, the cost lessening enabled by modular 3D printed components has made this form of personalization affordable to the public.

3D printing has also permitted the creation of parts that simply could not be made by any other means. Bugatti's eight-piston monobloc brake caliper is the main example. Bugatti favors titanium for specific components due to the material's high-performance characteristics, but processing the metal with conventional methods is costly and challenging.

The use of 3D printing not just enabled Bugatti to produce the caliper at the required scale but took its performance potential even higher, massively reducing the weight of the component while making it considerably stiffer and stronger than the conventional production alternative (aluminum).

3. Producing Tooling and Manufacturing Aids

Engineers utilize manufacturing aids to make manufacturing and assembly processes simpler and more dependable, reducing cycle times and enhancing worker safety. Automotive factories and part suppliers employ thousands of custom jigs and fixtures, each customized and highly optimized for end-use. The outcome is a proliferation of custom tools, adding high cost and complexity to the manufacturing process.

Outsourcing the production of these custom portions to machining service providers who produce the components from a solid billet of plastic or metal can delay production by weeks. At the same time, the long lead times also make it hard to adapt to changes on the factory floor.

Linear manufacturing can cut the preparedness to a few hours and dramatically reduce costs compared to outsourcing parts to an external vendor. Complexity doesn't incur additional costs, so the parts can be better optimized for their end-use. New, resilient 3D printing materials have also permitted manufacturers to replace metal components in many cases with 3D printed plastic parts or to prototype and test the tools before committing.

Therefore, the production of manufacturing aids by 3D printing is becoming one of the biggest applications of the technology.

In manufacturing parts for gearbox assemblies, every part the company produces requires a series of custom jigs, fixtures, and other tooling designed specifically for that part as they go with multiple stages of machining using automatic lathes. For instance, Pankl Racing Systems relies on a 3D printing station with multiple Formlabs SLA 3D printers to fabricate their vital production tools. Using 3D printing, Pankl engineers managed to decrease the lead time for jigs by 90%—from two to three weeks to less than a day—and reduced costs by 80-90%, leading to $150,000 in savings.

4. Solving the Spare Parts issue

Spare parts have historically been pictured as a challenge for the automotive industry. Demand by nature is sporadic and uncertain, making the value of producing spare components a debatable financial decision in some instances. Still, the value of products is more precarious and fixing more difficult in the absence of easily available spare parts. Producing spares in expectation of later demand also requires a great expenditure on storage.

3D printing is well-positioned to significantly positively impact the automotive industry's spare parts problem. "I think the greatest factors [in solving the spare parts problem via 3D printing] are getting the materials that can match the performance of more conventional materials used for parts and cost-effectiveness.

With the employ of CAD, designs for all parts can be held as a digital copy, making the requirement to keep inventory outdated. With the proliferation of benchtop 3D printers, a new part could be produced in-store upon customer request. The availability of the technology will encourage suppliers to open up new spaces to provide an easy supply of 3D printed components and spare parts.

Even parts that no more exist can potentially be remade to requirement reverse engineered according to digital scans of existing parts. Older designs may find themselves with a modern rent of life.

5. Easing General Parts Manufacture

As 3D printing processes become more affordable concerning the cost of hardware and materials involved, we will see a refined transition towards producing regular automotive parts.

3D printers can enhance efficiency at the general parts manufacturing stage. By strengthening parts, 3D printing processes can also help reduce weight and enhance fuel efficiency.

The breadth of materials provided through 3D printing begins to meet the mechanical requirements of different vehicle components. As additive methods reach cost parity with conventional methods (e.g., molding, die-casting), it will make more sense from a profitable and financial point of view to include 3D printing further in general parts manufacture.