Nowadays, the demand for personalized and customized automotive products is growing, as well as it faces the difficulties of lengthy and costly manufacturing and maintenance for traditional complex parts. 3D printing technology is becoming increasingly popular among car companies, parts and after-sales service providers.
3D printing technology is advantageous in manufacturing complex products, production without molds and modular, and creating custom machining parts. It can reduce costs and manufacturing time, enabling personalized production.
This paper will analyze how to better utilize 3D printing technology in automotive manufacturing and maintenance.
3D Printing Applied in Automotive Manufacturing
The application of 3D printing technology in the automotive design stage reduces the design cost and improves the research and development efficiency. Moreover, there are many successful applications in the manufacturing stage, such as 3D printing of powertrains, chassis parts and interiors and exterior components.
3D printing technology can achieve the integrated design and manufacturing of automotive parts under the premise of ensuring the performance of structural components, providing more possibilities for automotive parts manufacturing. Therefore, its technical advantages are recognized including automobile customization, lightweight, electrification and intelligence.
3D Printed Powertrain
Automotive engineers can use 3D printing to produce functional prototypes or concept models early in the product development process, and can accelerate the validation and optimization of the iterative process. Compared to traditional models, 3D printing can dramatically improve verification efficiency, reduce design verification time, and minimize the cost of design errors.
3D printing can rapidly design and produce powertrain and engine components for high-performance race cars. The powertrain and engine are the core of a race car, and the key to high performance but with limited space. Designing and installing components in this area is a challenge because those components must be resistant to harsh conditions such as thermal cycling, vibration and corrosive fluids.
Additive manufacturing enables the development of optimized propulsion and control systems of greater complexity. Lamborghini, a renowned European sports car manufacturer, has utilized 3D printing to create engine ducts for sports car engines. In 2020, Porsche created the first complete electric powertrain housing with 3D printing, making it lighter, stronger and more compact. Engine and gearbox components produced using the laser melting process passed quality and stress tests with flying colors, proving that the technology can be applied to traditional consumer products.
3D Printed Chassis Components
3D printing is commonly applied in the development and production of automotive chassis systems for production and assembly tooling as well as functional testing. Many car companies produce high-strength prototypes of automotive chassis using engineering-grade thermoplastics, or customize assembly tools with high-performance engineering plastics.
Volkswagen of Germany used 3D printing to create titanium brake calipers that passed strength tests in 2017. This successful manufacturing case is a milestone in the history of 3D printing applications in the automotive parts sector.
3D Printed Automotive Exterior Trim
In automotive exterior design and manufacturing, 3D printing technology saves cost, simplifies production processes and improves production efficiency. It has been put in practice for many years including automotive lamps, fenders, automotive badges, front and rear bumpers and other automotive exterior parts.
Taking the car headlight as an example, the 3D printing technology Polyjet with photosensitive resin material is selected for printing practice. The practice verifies that integrated 3D printing is better than traditional model making.
Lamps model of 3D printing mainly avoids the cumbersome process of traditional modeling, and ease recruitment difficulties and other issues. But at the same time, there are some problems, such as loose thread connection, poor resistance to high and low temperatures of the model, etc.
3D Printing Applied in Automobile Repair
As 3D printing technology can well provide custom machining parts for automobile users, it is also widely used in the field of automobile repair. Many basic parts or tools can be quickly fabricated using 3D printing technology, such as automotive headlights, automotive seats, wheel hubs, engine cylinders, brake calipers, engine engine pipes, transmissions and service sets. 3D printing ensures repair efficiency and economic benefits for aftermarket service providers.
3D Printed Repair Parts
There are many types of cars and even more automotive parts. Also, the parts of limited edition or high-end cars are short of stock, and there are even out-of-print parts. This is very challenging for automotive aftermarket service providers, while 3D printing solves this problem by offering custom machining parts.
For example, many out-of-print automotive parts can be reproduced through 3D printing, assuring the replacement and repair of missing parts of diverse and rare models. At the same time, it can significantly reduce the cost of purchasing such parts and shorten the repair time.
3D Printed Auto Repair Tools
In the field of automobile repair, 3D printing technology is not only important in printing repair parts, but also commercially valuable in printing automobile repair tools.
For automotive aftermarket service providers, 3D printing can avoid stocking up on consumable tools, expensive but seldom-used and necessary tools and customized repair tools. This ensures that tools are available, which can effectively reduce repair costs and shorten the repair period.
Conclusion
The application of 3D printing technology is beneficial to the development of the automotive manufacturing and repair industry. And 3D printing greatly advances the development of the entire automotive industry.
Therefore, 3D printing technology will be one of the ideal processing technologies in future automotive parts manufacturing and maintenance. It will eventually be widely used in automotive product design, research and development and other areas.
