GKN Powder Metallurgy

Auto companies have traditionally relied on the engines they created and the styling of their cars for brand value; research and development around engines was one of the core tenets of the established car business. But with electric vehicles, that is all changing. The car industry is going through the biggest transformation since it was founded more than a hundred years ago.

EVS INCREASING DEMAND FOR ADDITIVE MANUFACTURING

With the move to electric vehicles, each car company must re-architect its entire fleet from internal combustion engines to EVs. It’s not just taking the engine out and replacing it. It requires a redesign from the ground up; it’s a completely new vehicle platform. The fact that you don’t have a huge water-cooled, pollution-generating motor in the middle of the car affects the entire design of the car — including the cabin.

This shift to EVs will also increase the demand for 3D printing (also known as additive manufacturing). Here is why.

EVs are a new market segment, and the adoption curve is not immediate. In general, the unit volumes for EVs are much smaller — typically a fraction of the volume of cars with traditional engines. So instead of making two million or five million of a particular model, an automaker will only make 100,000 or 500,000. During the transition, a lot of car companies are only producing hundreds or thousands of units of their flagship brands.

Those volumes favor additive manufacturing because AM is most advantageous around design freedom, allowing the optimization of the function of the part without the tooling to make those parts. In fact, additive manufacturing can make one part as efficiently as 10 parts.

Also, when it comes to EVs, weight is extremely important because weight is the enemy in physics. You want to make the car as light as possible and as aerodynamic as possible to expend less energy. Additive manufacturing allows automakers to change out components through the design process. Companies want to keep changing designs quickly, and additive manufacturing allows engineers to create geometries with an optimal strength-to-weight ratio.

With performance automobiles, for example, it’s important for them to go as fast as possible with the least amount of fuel so they can have an edge in the race. To do that, you need to have very specialized, highly tuned componentry: engines with precise geometries for fluid and airflow, as well as structural parts where you can take the weight out. If you can optimize the geometry of the suspension or brake calipers, that gives you better performance.

ADDITIVE MANUFACTURING: IDEAL FOR AFTERMARKET PARTS

As we go through the transition to EVs, additive manufacturing will also play a larger and larger role in aftermarket parts.

Many parts are designed for high volumes using traditional manufacturing. When you make a mold, you want to create a lot of parts (for example, one million parts per year). But if there is only a demand for 1,000 or 5,000 parts per year, you either have to produce them all at once — and wrestle with the problem of storage — or run the production really inefficiently.

“It’s not simply 3D-printed parts at scale; it’s AM integrated into a manufacturing process that can go through a demanding qualification process and can meet quality and certification standards”

However, additive manufacturing allows you to print to order. So if you’re producing one car a day, you will be making one part a day. Also, over the long term, manufacturers sometimes lose the manufacturing process for the parts. So those parts need to be re-engineered to be 3D printed because the original manufacturer doesn’t have the mold anymore to make the spare parts.

NEW AM TECHNOLOGY YIELDS ECONOMIES OF SCALE

One of the biggest challenges, with additive manufacturing, is that the economies often do not make sense once you get past small unit volumes. However, it has been difficult to scale to high volumes due to the capital equipment needed to do that. One of the new additive-manufacturing technologies creating a lot of buzzes is metal binder jetting, where you produce a part with a process similar to what we use for laser jet fusion.

In traditional metal 3D printing, you often use a laser to melt the part together. High-volume machines use multiple lasers. But one of the premises of metal binder jetting (or MBJ) is that you print a layer at a time. So instead of bonding one pixel at a time with a laser, you can do a whole layer with one pass of the printer. What you end up with is a part that needs to go through a second process — called sintering — that allows you to transform the part into its final state.

The benefit of pairing these two processes is that, for certain geometries, you can produce most parts cheaper and faster than with traditional manufacturing. It means you can move applications that can justify additive manufacturing as a manufacturing process too much higher volumes. So you can get the design freedom and ability to proceed without tooling.

That’s advantageous because the unit volumes are lower for EVs, and the costs for MBJ parts are cheaper compared to laser 3D printing, which opens up many more parts that can be cost-justified for electric vehicles. Whether that’s inside or outside the body of the car — anywhere where there are metal or machined parts, or even stamped parts — there’s an opportunity to use additive manufacturing. Metal binder jetting makes it more economical.

MANUFACTURING STANDARDS WILL REMAIN HIGH

Just because we are transitioning to EVs doesn’t mean there will be relaxed standards. To deliver parts for cars, you need to meet stringent quality standards and certifications. It’s not simply 3D-printed parts at scale; it’s AM integrated into a manufacturing process that can go through a demanding qualification process and can meet quality and certification standards. The auto industry requires AM part suppliers to have quality systems and operations processes that match the way they’re used to sourcing parts.

It’s amazing if you look at where we were in 2016 or 2017, and how much EV production in the United States has increased even over the past two to three years. It creates an enormous opportunity for manufacturers that can serve automotive companies with advanced additive manufacturing.