Meet the Makers of an Exotic (Partially) 3-D Printed Car (2 Videos)

Video Meet the Makers of an Exotic (Partially) 3-D Printed Car (2 Videos) 25

Posted by Roblimo on Wednesday July 01, 2015 @04:46PM from the a-gasoline-car-more-efficient-than-an-electric dept.

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Last month, in a story headlined 3D Printed Supercar Chassis Unveiled, we promised video interviews with builders Kevin and Brad "in the near future." Here they are. First, we have Kevin Czinger, Founder & CEO of Divergent Microfactories. He says the way we build cars is more important from an environmental standpoint than how we fuel them, and that the way we make cars now is a lot less efficient and a lot more expensive than it needs to be. Divergent's first demo vehicle, the Blade, is a tandem-seating 700 HP supercar its makers say does 0 - 60 in 2.5 seconds. Price? No word yet, but it's safe to assume "plenty" might be an accurate guess.

In the second video, Blade project lead Brad Balzer goes into detail about how, why, and where they use 3-D printing, and explains the modular nature of their car chassis design. He says they don't need to change many parts to go from ultra-sports car to pickup truck. He also says that while Divergent Microfactories is working on cars right now, their manufacturing system can be applied to many different industries. Indeed, their long-range goal is to help people build microfactories making many different kinds of products faster, more flexibly, and for less money than it takes to make similar manufactured items today.

Note: The transcript covers both videos and has a little 'bonus' material in it, too.

Timothy Lord for Slashdot: Kevin, here at Solidcon you’ve showed off some of the structure that goes into the car you just unveiled, can you talk about that little bit about modularity and about ease of construction, and what makes this a different kind of car?

Kevin Czinger : Sure. I mean, today there are really two different ways to manufacture cars. One is an artisan way, where you build a space frame say for a racing car which will be out of tubing and you need somebody really who is an artisan, expert at that type of building who will weld together a, you know, out of aluminum or chromoly, a chassis. And each one of those is basically a snowflake. They may do two of them, they may be very similar, but each one is a snowflake.

On the other end, you have very large scale mass production where you take large rolls of processed steel or aluminum and whether you are Toyota or Tesla, you take those rolls, cut them into sheets and then those sheets are stamped into body panels. And that happens in a five-story, $100 million-plus stamping machine that uses hard steel tooling. And that tooling takes four, eight or more months to tool, because you're taking those metal sheets and stamping out parts of them.

Those parts are then joined together by welding and then you have your car body. What that does is number one, it costs hundreds of millions or billions of dollars of capital to do. And once you do that, everything is about managing capital return on a design that's been frozen in time, in that carbon steel stamping. That is something that freezes innovation and requires you to think about the economics of the car business solely as capacity utilization.

Slashdot: There are lot more bike companies than there are car companies...

Kevin: Right. So, how many of these things can you stamp and sell, whether there is demand or not? So, for example, right now the average car company has three times inventory to sales and that shows you the expense, the inflexibility of it. And you know, if you look at it from a life cycle analysis, the damage that that kind of mass production does to our health and to the environment.

We're looking to do away with all of the inflexibility of the stamping equipment uni-body construction model and do it in a way that allows replicability and scalability in human sized design assembly units that we call microfactories. So what we're doing for example with a car like this, which is a proof-of-concept of the manufacturing alternative we present, we're taking a series of aluminum alloy connectors, structural connectors that will 3D print, and we print them with features that are impossible to manufacture using stamping or machining.

Slashdot: What’s an example of that kind of features, maybe like embedded conductors?

Kevin: An example of a feature is – and I'll have one of the engineers show you a node in a minute -- there is a channel for the injection of aerospace grade epoxy. So within the node itself, the connector, which can have geometries that also can’t be replicated by machining or by some type of casting, you'll have a way to inject that epoxy internally into the node and then there's actually a port that allows for a vacuum to be created so that you have uniform spreading of the epoxy throughout the joint. And then built into the joint also, printed O-rings which allow for an even seal.

So if you're looking at doing something that's replicable, meaning the exact same amount in every assembly build of epoxy, all evenly distributed and all tight, you know with tight tolerances, building these features into the node which only 3D printing enables is key to that replicability and scalability.

And so if you're looking for an automotive application for 3D printing, those are the strengths and the features that you incorporate. In terms of doing it for a larger structure, the issue is the cube problem. If you double the size of something you're 3D printing in metal, you cube the time it takes to build.

So if it took four hours to build that turns to 64. So we use it only strategically to create these nodes. So this car has about 61 pounds of aluminum nodes and the rest is aerospace grade carbon fiber tubing and paneling and the car has about 41 pounds of carbon fiber in the chassis. So the total chassis weight is 102 pounds, which dramatically reduces the amount of material and energy required to make a complex structure like that.

Now, this is an engineering prototype, and as a proof-of-concept for the materials and the process that we're using to manufacture, this node-based process. But we've tested and standardized a set of build objects where between this car and a pickup truck built on the same technology you would reuse about 80% of the same structural connecting building blocks.

Slashdot: With that lower weight you can also go a lot faster in the same power?

Kevin: You can go faster or you know what, fundamentally you can have a supercar that has a four cylinder motor instead of a 12-cylinder, 10-cylinder, 8-cylinder, 6-cylinder and it can still be a supercar because it's about power to weight and you can start to think smartly, instead of supersizing you make things super light, and you think about design orientation, you think about power to weight, you think about the correct set of performance ratios.

Slashdot: And you mentioned that you did grow up doing some tinkering with cars?

Kevin: Yeah. I did, I grew up in Cleveland. I was the youngest of five, in a very blue collar family. My older brother who I was close to, I had two older brothers, they both worked on cars but one was master mechanic, later the chief mechanic for the Cleveland Fire Department, but at that age in the 70s, we would build race cars and I think you may have seen in my presentation there was a 1968 Barracuda, 440 wedge, it won spring nationals at Dragway 42 in Ohio in SuperStock Automatic.

So, we built and raced cars and I know in my talk I said, for hundreds of dollars, you could find parts and do versioning and create really cool stuff, in this car itself because of the aerospace industry driving down the cost of standardized carbon fiber tubing and paneling, there's only hundreds of dollars of carbon fiber in the chassis of this car. Obviously our objective is to drive down the node component to that same level over time.

Slashdot: And that's going to keep happening with carbon fiber, especially as the uses for it keep expanding.

Kevin: Yes, absolutely.

Slashdot: You know, I want to go now from the cool technology aspect of this car to something you also talked about quite a bit about today, which is the worldwide implications of energy use when it comes to making transportation modes like cars and pickup trucks especially, what is it that people often don't consider when it comes to the energy footprint of vehicles?

Kevin: I would say for us, I mean what's unique about human beings among animals, we can project into the future and understand what future consequences are and then do long term planning. So right now, what do we know? We know that the number of cars on this planet, it took us 113 years to build 2 billion; over the next 30 to 40 years we're going to add another 4 billion cars. So over a much shorter period of time, we’ll triple the number of cars on the planet. We've been thinking that as long as there are low or zero tailpipe emissions that we can have as many cars as we want. That is not the reality of it. I mean, I was an electric car entrepreneur, ran a factory, ran an assembly factory, ran a battery manufacturing factory.

What I learned very clearly from that is that tailpipe exhausts are actually the smallest component of that environmental and health impact of the car, the mining to manufacturing to disposal is a much, much larger percentage of the environmental and health impact. Forget about climate change for a second. If you look just at the impact on our health and the impact on the diversity of our environment and our environmental conditions, if we go from 2 billion cars to 6 billion cars without radically reducing the material and energy that we use, we will destroy our planet.

So, we have to start thinking about how we change things, how we dematerialize manufacturing to reduce material and energy. If you look, we have had serious studies done of the life cycle effect of products on the environment and on our health. National Academy of Sciences has built a model. Argonne Labs has built a model. These are non-corporate models that show the impact of cars on our environment, on our health and the environmental costs in general. It's very clear what the damage is. It's shown in the presentation I did today, the white paper that O'Reilly has published.

We need to create a real awareness among people that we can't fool ourselves any longer. There are real consequences and it's not a climate change debate. This is our environment. It's our health and what we're doing right now will destroy that environment, will destroy our health and the data and numbers show it. And especially for the Slashdot readership, look at the National Academy of Sciences report, look at it closely. We, as engineers, as scientists, as people who are just concerned citizens, we have to stop being ideological. We have to stop using any word electric car as a totem. We have to think what is the total impact? Think of things from a systems analysis standpoint, a holistic standpoint.

And I think once we start doing that and think scientifically rather than ideologically, we’ll understand, leaving aside climate change, the real threat that we face. Part of the reason why I wanted to build a sexy car was to be able to at some level raise the profile of that concept of lifecycle damage of a product and we hope we're trying to do that.

Slashdot: One more thing. Since this is a prototype here we’ve got in front of us, it’s a workable car though, right?

Kevin: That's totally functional supercar, that is a badass car.

Slashdot: Do you think you will be selling cars to people in five years from today?

Kevin: I mean Divergent Microfactories itself is focused on the manufacturing platform and developing the technology, researching and developing and versioning that technology and then putting those tools in the hands of small entrepreneurial teams, making it affordable, making it powerful. But the best way to do that is to create actual instances that allow you to take knowhow you have, create an object, have it in body and then incorporate it into the tools that you have. So, we'll continue to build I would say things that we think are cutting edge versions of cars rather than mass production broad ranges of cars.

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Slashdot: Brad, what is that you're holding your hand right now. Talk about some of the

Brad Balzer: Right here I'm holding one of the 3D printed nodes that make up the chassis of the Blade. This is printed out of aluminum with a process called Direct Metal Laser Sintering, DMLS for short. And one of the reasons we 3D print these parts is because of some of the very unique geometry features that we can attain with 3D printing. So one of the keys to the technology is we're trying to democratize the building of complex structures, which means anybody should be able to assemble these things and to do it the same way every single time. So we 3D printed some of these features into the parts to allow that to happen.

So if you look here inside one of the node ends, you'll see that there is an internal kind of channel there, the ridge on the inside of the diameter of the two, and that actually is an internal passageway that connects this hole to this injection port right here. So the reason that that exists is because we slide a carbon fiber tube over this node right there.

And this surface right here is what's called the bond line, glue is what attaches it, so it's a structural adhesive or glue that attaches the aluminum to the carbon fiber tube, and this area right here is where the glue actually resides. So the key to this whole technology in allowing it to be repeatable every single time is that we have an injection port here where we inject glue, we pull a vacuum through this other port.

What happens is the glue is pulled up with the vacuum and covers this whole surface very, very evenly and that's critical to ensuring that the strength of the bond is the same every single time, and that's important because that means the chassis is going to be strong every single time.

Slashdot: And that's a process that evidently is amenable to say anything else?

Brad: Yeah, to any complex structures, it’s not just cars, it could be motorcycles, it could be bridges, it could be homes, it could be anything that has a complex structure that that takes load if you will.

Slashdot: And what kind of glue is it that actually is in there?

Brad: Yeah, so it's a structural adhesive. It's actually an aerospace-grade adhesive that's available off-the-shelf. It's actually very inexpensive and the reason for that is because in the last decade or so Boeing and Airbus have really pushed forward epoxies and composites with all the work that they have been doing with the Dreamliner, the 787, and then the new Airbus as well. So we've been leveraging a lot of lessons they've learned and applying it to the technology that we put into the Divergent Microfactories, the node if you will.

Slashdot: Now in addition to the glue channels that you’ve talked about, can you talk a little bit more about the other physical aspects of this node, like what's this, you have these curved sections here

Brad: Sure, so the beauty of 3D printing, the phrase is 'part complexity is free.' So with 3D printing, right, you print the part on a bed and it literally grows out of the bed itself, and the nice thing with that is you print at a 20-micron basically layer, 20 microns is about the thickness of a human hair. So you're printing this part in a cross-section of the human hair and that happens every like less than a second it takes to print every single layer, so the part grows and because of that you could do very complex things you can't do any other way, and you can also add features that you can't add any other way.

For example, these – saddles is what we call them -- these are actually for the wire harness on the car, this is where the wire harness sits. This is for the brake lines on the car. And again, we integrated all this into the node because it was free to do, and it also helps reduce the weight because now we don't need secondary brackets in mounting, the part literally has those [mounts] already printed into it, and since with 3D printing the process is agnostic to features like this, we decided to do it because it's well integrated, it makes the car lighter because you don't have secondary brackets, and it leverages the strengths of 3D manufacturing which you can add features like that, and it doesn't cost you anything to do.

Slashdot: There are no fasteners to break.

Brad: And there are no fasteners either, right, which again reduces the part count, reduces the weight, reduces the time it takes to assemble the chassis, etc.

Slashdot: What about the strength of this, is it durable?

Brad: Yeah. So it's comparable to, if you were to build the frame out of steel, out of chromoly, it has the same bending rigidity as well as torsional rigidity of a frame that's manufactured in a traditional sense.

Slashdot: Within the Blade car that's right behind you, how many of these nodes are there?

Brad: Yeah, so there are 69 nodes in the Blade, 39 of which are identical. They're actually all kind of the universal node that looks like this. Only 20% of the nodes in the car are complex structures, complex nodes like this, and the beauty of that, right, is that moving forward in the future we can build the sports cars, the supercar behind me or we could build a pickup truck using 80% percent of exactly the same nodes.

To get a pickup truck instead of the blade, you just need to change the 20% that are super complex. Instead of the engine bay, it's going to attach a pickup bed, for example. And that's one of the real novel features of this, is that only 20% of the nodes have to be different to go from a sports car to a pickup truck, and because of that we have an immense amount of flexibility and creativity in what kinds of cars we can make and we can do it really quick.

Slashdot: And like you say, this is quite applicable to things besides cars?

Brad: Exactly. And the standardized building blocks right at the nodes, that’s the enabling technology that we're going to be sharing with all the microfactories and giving them the toolset, so that they can go and make their own complex structures.

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