Remaining competitive in the increasingly crowded EV market will require all automakers to continue integrating cutting-edge technologies and new materials, processes and machinery.
The auto industry is undergoing rapid transformation as consumer demand and
regulatory mandates create mounting pressure to transition away from fossil
fuels,
toward electric
vehicles.
Ford Motor Company, the sixth-largest automaker in the
world, has embraced 3D printing as a key tool in keeping up with intense
competition and increasingly shorter development cycles as the global EV
race
heats up.
At the heart of Ford's European operations is Ford
Cologne,
established in 1930 and best known for assembling the Ford Fiesta. Adjacent
to the factory is the PD Merkenich Rapid Technology Center (RTC),
responsible for designing all Ford passenger vehicles for the European market —
including the Fiesta, Focus and Kuga. The new, all-electric
Explorer
— Ford’s first EV for the European market — recently entered serial production
in the Cologne plant, and 3D prototyping has been integral to its rapid
development.
Producing full-scale automotive prototypes
Producing full-scale vehicle prototypes requires a wide range of tools. So, the
RTC has its own injection-molding machines, forming tools and a wide range of
subtractive manufacturing tools (such as milling machines); as well as a growing
suite of tools for additive
manufacturing
— including fused deposition modeling (FDM), stereolithography
(SLA), and selective laser sintering (SLS) polymer and metal 3D
printers.
“Additive manufacturing is very important in the development process,” says RTC
Supervisor Sandro
Piroddi. “It gives you
the opportunity to produce parts very quickly, very efficiently, reduce costs
[and] react on a short-term basis. In the direction of electrification, the
development times are getting shorter — so, the time you have to develop parts
and verify parts of vehicles is getting shorter — therefore, [having] this
technology in the development process makes you much more competitive.”
Developing design prototypes with SLA 3D Printing
SLA 3D printers are used mainly in the workshop for design prototypes that
require good surface quality and need to be rapidly produced for quick
iterations. PD Merkenich uses several printers from Massachusetts-based
Formlabs — including a Form 3L large-format SLA 3D
printer; and Ford recently became one of the first companies to use the Form
4, Formlabs’ latest
MSLA 3D printer.
The RTC team says the printer’s speed enables it to deliver more parts in less
time and able to accommodate short-term requests. For the new Explorer, the team
leveraged SLA 3D printing to validate the design of many exterior and interior
parts.
“Some years ago, it was days — now, we are just printing some parts in minutes,”
says Bruno Alves, Additive
Manufacturing Expert and Tooling Specialist at Ford. “So, the engineers are not
afraid to make new designs, new iterations, because they know now that they will
get the parts very fast.”
Testing mechanical parts with SLS 3D Printing
The workshop also operates a large suite of SLS 3D printers used for testing
mechanical parts — including parts that were difficult to physically test in the
past, due to their complexity to produce.
“For the [cover for the charging port], it was important to use SLS — [because]
we needed a functional part that would enable us to test the mechanisms. It's a
really complex design that we are not able to produce in any other way,” Alves
says. “We cannot mill this part; we cannot use injection molding to produce just
some samples. So, the best way is to print in a material that we can test
physically.”
Combining traditional and next-gen manufacturing
Having diverse technologies in-house also enables the Rapid Technology Center to
create hybrid workflows — for example, by combining traditional manufacturing
processes with 3D-printed rapid tooling.
For the new Explorer, the team produced rubber components for the door handle
assembly using 3D-printed mold inserts in its in-house injection molding
machine.
“This was a complex process, because we are using several inserts and there are
also several different designs that could have several iterations each,” Alves
explains. “Normally, external injection molding will take maybe two or three
months. Internally, using additive manufacturing, we can speed up the process to
maybe two weeks — three weeks, maximum. For this project, if we had to use
external tools, it would have been much more time-consuming and we would not
have been able to deliver the parts on time.”
Fast-tracking electrification
Ford's commitment to an entirely electric lineup in
Europe
— and 40-50 percent of its global vehicle volume — by 2030 sets an ambitious
roadmap for the PD Merkenich facility. Remaining competitive as automakers
including Aston Martin, Jaguar Land
Rover,
Porsche
and
Lamborghini
accelerate advancements in the increasingly crowded EV market will require all
automakers to continue integrating cutting-edge technologies and new materials,
processes and machinery.
Published Aug 21, 2024 8am EDT / 5am PDT / 1pm BST / 2pm CEST
Sustainable Brands Staff
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