3D printed brake calipers reduce the weight of the car, while ensuring the safety of the car.
3D printed brake calipers
The lightweight of the body has always been an important work of the car factory research and development, a few kilograms will affect the performance. However, limited by traditional manufacturing techniques, some innovative structures and materials have the problem of "designing but not building", and 3D printing technology can directly generate parts of any shape from computer graphics data.
As the saying goes, it's better to lose ten pounds than one horse. In order to reduce the weight of the body and ensure the safety of the car, foreign automobile manufacturers have used metal 3D printing technology to optimize the brake caliper.
Why 3D printing is necessary to lose weight?
Under the premise of ensuring performance, the core goal of weight reduction of brake calipers is lightweight, and to achieve this core, you can start from two points:
Lightweight material: Although the strength of steel is high, it is also very heavy, which is not as good as aluminum alloy. Who has a stronger strength/weight ratio than an aluminum alloy? That's titanium! But there is a problem in titanium alloy, that is, it is difficult to cut, poor wear resistance, in short, it is not good to process.
Lightweight structure: The existing brake caliper structure is already tempered, is there room for optimization? That's called bionic design! However, there is a problem in bionic design: there are hollow and complex structures, and traditional processes such as cutting and casting are difficult to process.
The difficulties faced by the realization of these two points can be solved by 3D printing. The most commonly used technology for metal 3D printing is Selective Laser Melting (SLM), which uses fine focusing spots to rapidly melt preset metal powder and directly obtain parts with arbitrary shapes and complete metallurgical bonding, and the resulting production density can reach more than 99%.
The weight of this brake caliper is 2.9 kg, which is more than 40% less than the original 4.9 kg, and the effect is remarkable. Tensile strength of 1,250 N/mm^2, that is, it can withstand 12.5 tons per square centimeter.
People are generally concerned about the battery life of electric vehicles, industry development guidelines also point out the direction: crazy pile battery is not environmentally friendly, not feasible, must be around the goal of reducing 100 kilometers of power consumption, from the optimization of energy efficiency and lightweight two perspectives to improve the technical level. The lightweight here needs to rely on 3D printing to achieve.
