As an invention in the 1990s, 3D printing technology is nothing new today. At the beginning of the 20th century, researchers have used 3D printing technology to create artificial limbs, dentures and other objects. With the development of technology, what 3D printing can do seems to be more and more complex and extensive. Technology applications involve various industries. From table and chair cups to house villas, even human cells can be printed as if they were clones using 3D printing technology.
This technology is theoretically based on a digital model file, using 3D printing materials (usually powdered metals or plastics and other adhesive materials) to build objects by layer-by-layer printing. Popularly speaking, based on computer-based 3D modeling, computer-controlled overlays of "printed material" at a thickness of a few tenths of a millimeter will eventually transform the three-dimensional model on a computer into a physical object. It can be said that with 3D printing technology, almost everyone can become a designer and print out what they want. The use of 3D printing technology to print a car is certainly not impossible.
In addition to printing cars can also print rocket aircraft?
In fact, the automotive industry is one of the earliest users of 3D printing technology. And not only in the automotive industry, 3D printing technology has also been applied in the manufacture of aircraft rockets. In 2010, the world's first automotive Urbee printed by a 3D printer came out. But the following year, engineers from the University of Southampton developed the world’s first 3D printed aircraft. In 2014, SpaceX launched the Falcon9 rocket, which was powered by 3D printing.
Nowadays, many foreign technology companies have used 3D printing technology to manufacture various supercars. Thanks to the advantages of 3D printing materials, the sports cars they manufacture are also extremely lightweight. For example, the "Blade" super-run from the American company "Devergent3D" carries a 3.0V8 engine, but the vehicle weighs only 636 kg and the 100 km speedup is within 2.5 seconds.
See if you are already very curious, since 3D printing technology is so powerful, can print cars, aircraft can also print rocket engines. After that, do we not need to buy vehicles that the manufacturers have designed for us? If we want to use a 3D printing technology to build a model, we can design a car of our own.
The answer is: No. Because all the cars that have been declared to be manufactured using 3D printing technology, without exception, only print out the car's shell or part of the plastic and metal parts. For example, the "Blade" super-run, this car is actually only the body, the main and sub-frames are printed with 3D, its engine, transmission components or traditional manufacturing products.
In addition to the car shell, the interior of the car body is also a body frame that uses 3D printing to manufacture automobile parts and carbon fiber tubular supports and then manually assembles them. Moreover, the critical density of the key parts such as the frame may be smaller than the cast metal, the strength cannot be guaranteed, and there is a potential safety hazard. So strictly speaking, this is not a true 3D printing car.
What is the real use in the car?
You may still be curious to see this, so since 3D printing technology can print a rocket engine, why can't you print the car engine and all other parts of the car? In fact, this is the bottleneck of the current 3D printing technology in the automotive field. From a technical point of view, first of all, it is the problem of 3D printing of raw materials. 3D printers cannot be used with any material. Currently, they are limited to materials such as plastics, photosensitive resins, and metal powders. The advantage is that the material utilization rate exceeds 95% or more, almost no waste is produced, and it is suitable for complex structures and the like. However, for the complex and safety-required products of automobiles, many key components must use traditional manufacturing processes to ensure overall safety.
Therefore, the current 3D printing technology is mainly used in cars or new car models. It is for the purpose of experimental testing, but it will not be mass-produced. Most car companies such as BMW, General Motors, Volkswagen and Volvo have used 3D printing technology to manufacture automotive parts for wind resistance and structural tests. For example, the 2016 Peugeot Fractal concept car is a product of 3D printing technology. SAIC GM has also used 3D printing to manufacture Angkor's air-conditioned boxes for performance testing. The entire development cycle is only three days.
The traditional auto parts or vehicle design and development need to go through the development of molds, sludge models and other series of processes, time-consuming and laborious. However, with the 3D printer, it is possible to rapidly modify the design scheme and iterate a large number of iterations, which greatly shortens the time required for product design and prototype development, and improves research and development efficiency.
Customization is too far away, the scale is king
The other reason why 3D printing cannot be used for mass production of vehicles is cost. Although personalized cars are tempting, they are not currently available to the average consumer. At present, only brands such as Bentley and Rolls-Royce for rich-class owners will use 3D printing technology to provide personalized customization, but customization content is limited to a few components such as wheels and pedals.
After all, not using 3D printing technology to create some small objects, such as a small model to do, a small structure. The price of large-scale 3D printers used in the automotive industry is often in the range of tens of thousands of yuan to a few million yuan, and it is different from the price of ordinary small 3D printers.
Assume that future 3D printing materials can meet the safety requirements of traditional automobiles. Then, using 3D printing technology to mass-produce automobiles, the first is production efficiency, because 3D printing is more like a centralized production method than the traditional method of automobile decentralized manufacturing. Although there are only a few dozen parts for a typical 3D printed car, there are thousands of parts for traditional cars. However, the number of parts has been reduced, which seems to reduce the assembly time. However, due to the long manufacturing time of individual parts, the use time of a single device is virtually occupied, and the production efficiency is naturally reduced. For cars, a large-scale manufacturing industry, time is the cost.
For example, the entire production process of a complete vehicle may take up to eight or nine hours, but the production line of an entire vehicle factory can produce about 1,000 vehicles a day, and new cars are manufactured almost every minute. However, if you use 3D printing technology to achieve the same efficiency, you need more printers first, which is also the cost.
Secondly, the new production technology of 3D printing is not a simple method issue but a new manufacturing system. More importantly, it has nothing in common with traditional assembly line production methods from raw materials to machines to workers. Adopting new ones means that old ones need to be completely abandoned, and all supporting resources need to be re-integrated. For manufacturers who strive for excellence, it is also unacceptable.
AL channel summary
Although 3D printing technology will theoretically make future automobile personalized manufacturing possible, leaving the limitations of the mold, the future of car design will have unlimited imagination. But there is another sentence: Design still has to be handed to the designers, not to mention the cost of mass-produced personalized cars. If the car design is really completely left to the discretion of the consumers, then the future of the road Really can't imagine.
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