Yearly, requirements group SAE Worldwide holds a contest referred to as Formulation SAE, during which college students from each undergraduate and graduate packages design, construct, and race small formula-style race vehicles. For this 12 months’s occasion, the College of Southern California’s (USC) Formulation SAE crew partnered with the UK’s Wayland Additive, an unique tools producer (OEM) of electron-beam additive manufacturing (EBAM) {hardware}, to print a titanium exhaust collector.
In a case examine that Wayland Additive launched, the Suspension Lead for the USC Racing crew, Samuel McCarthy, defined why exhaust collectors are such tough components to fabricate — even for typical manufacturing processes:
“The exhaust collector is the half that joins every cylinder’s exhaust into one stream and it straight impacts engine effectivity and efficiency. …There are normally two crucial design concerns: efficiency versus manufacturing problem,” McCarthy famous. “Optimum efficiency requires optimized angles of the tubes the place the exhaust movement meets, a sure preliminary contact of movement.
“Manufacturing the best exhaust collector with these most popular angles is usually not attainable with conventional strategies, comparable to welding, and there’s all the time a trade-off between [performance and manufacturing difficulty]. Through the use of AM, particularly Wayland’s NeuBeam course of, now we have been in a position to decrease the trade-off and get one of the best of each worlds.”
Notably, USC Racing first approached Wayland Additive at RAPID + TCT 2024 in Los Angeles, which happened on the finish of June. The collaborators then labored collectively remotely to design and print the ultimate half.
With the Formulation SAE deadline of Could 14-17, 2025, which means USC Racing and Wayland Additive efficiently designed, examined, and built-in the titanium exhaust collector in effectively beneath a 12 months — an particularly spectacular feat contemplating it’s a part with none in depth 3D printing monitor report, a minimum of when it comes to publicly out there data.
In response to McCarthy, the success of the ultimate half trusted the precise benefits of EBAM, particularly the decrease residual stresses on the half, when put next with powder mattress fusion (PBF): “The warmth cycles seen and excessive vibratory surroundings may fracture a [PBF] half. Additionally, the small hook retaining function would have confirmed too tough to descale.”
In the long run, the half that Wayland produced decreased the exhaust collector’s size by 50 %, and helped USC Racing win third place in the autocross occasion at Formulation SAE. The USC automobile additionally completed an endurance problem that almost all of groups in 2024 weren’t in a position to full, which was a key purpose for USC Racing.
Other than the engineering achievements and efficiency milestones on show right here, it’s noteworthy that this challenge was solely made attainable because of the supply of a digitally-based manufacturing know-how and AM’s accelerated iteration cycle. It is usually vital that, due to a gathering at a commerce present, an undergraduate engineering pupil was in a position to entry a extremely area of interest, comparatively costly know-how.
All of these little particulars had been required to be introduced into concord to be able to yield a part that the world has by no means seen earlier than. The attractive factor about AM is that it allows makers to droop their disbelief about what’s bodily and logistically attainable lengthy sufficient to develop their imaginations, till creativeness breaks by means of into actuality. It permits engineers-in-training engaged on pupil tasks to collaborate with small companies midway internationally to out-design typical mass business.
Photographs courtesy of Wayland Additive
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