Authorised Partner
3D Printing for Automotive
Build and Validate High-Quality Parts Faster
Meet the Challenge of Rapid Innovation in Today’s Automotive Industry
New mobility solutions and ecosystems are redefining the industry and making rapid innovation essential.
Our consultative approach to engineering and additive manufacturing technology can give you the competitive advantage you need to meet this challenge. We will empower you to drive manufacturing productivity, lower costs, and develop new designs that optimize performance and create the unique experiences your customers demand.
Applications of Additive Manufacturing in the Automotive Industry
Increase Component Performance in Challenging Environmental Conditions
New propulsion and control technologies are transforming the automotive industry and upending previously stable vehicle designs.
Our unique additive manufacturing solutions allow you to innovate by enabling you to rapidly test and iterate new designs, create advanced parts that can withstand the extremes of underhood and powertrain environments, and maximize the efficiencies of your manufacturing process. All this helps give you a crucial advantage over your competitors.
Solve Your Underhood and Powertrain Challenges
Increase Performance
Propulsion, drivetrain, and powertrain systems must be able to withstand environments with high temperatures, exposure to chemicals, and extreme loading conditions, often within a constrained package. Our additive manufacturing solution helps you meet this need using advanced materials capable of optimizing performance in even the most challenging conditions, allowing you to develop unique innovations.
Test and Iterate Faster
The advancements in powertrain, drivetrain and propulsion technologies in today’s automotive environment often outpace our traditional prototyping and validation approaches. Understanding the nuances of underhood functional and environmental performance requires rapid testing. With our additive manufacturing solutions, you can accurately represent the design intent and perform in extreme environments and forces. Reduce iteration time from weeks or days to hours.
Gain Precise Control
Traditional manufacturing constraints limit engineers’ ability to design advanced propulsion and mobility systems. Our comprehensive underhood 3D printing solution includes equipment, software, advanced materials, and services, giving you the capabilities you need to design complex parts for limited spaces.
Optimise Manufacturing
Productivity in production and service is an essential characteristic for the automotive business, but today’s innovations are often at odds with this reality. This is why it is so vital to create systems that maximize efficiency and drive continuous value. Our additive solutions will elevate your assembly process by reducing complexity and validating design and manufacturing through production-grade additive components.
Deliver Unique and Tailored Car Interiors and Trim
While technological innovations have created new opportunities for delivering unique driving experiences, they can also present daunting engineering challenges for quality, fit, and finish.
Using additive manufacturing, our consultants can help provide you with cutting-edge solutions that simplify the manufacturing process and make it easier to create durable, unique, customized interior auto parts. We bring the knowledge and technology to make your designs a reality
Solve Your Interior and Trim Challenges
Accelerate Testing and Iteration
Understanding the nuances of interior cabin experiences typically requires large investments in time and materials to support continuous design, testing, and iteration. Our additive manufacturing technology reduces the time this process takes from days to hours, helping to improve quality—including feel, view, appearance, ergonomics, and function—and save costs.
Optimize Manufacturing
Designing automotive interiors that balance innovation with efficient manufacturing processes can be challenging. Our additive solutions will elevate your assembly process by reducing overall components and manufacturing variability through innovations such as integrated latching and fastening mechanisms.
Access Advanced Materials
Designing high-end experiences requires access to a wide range of high-quality materials. Our additive manufacturing processes come with a broad qualified material portfolio, as well as support for surfaces, finishes, plating, painting, and graining. The interior component shown is printed with Accura Xtreme material on a stereolithography (SLA) printer.
Deliver Personalized Designs
Creating next-generation interiors means designing and building spaces that are connected to each driver, but tailoring these to the consumer can be costly. We facilitate mass customization by giving engineers precise control over each component, from the build to the finish, enabling a unique customer experience.
Maximize Performance and Enhance Your Brand Value Through Faster Testing and Validation
The exterior of a vehicle has dual functions: its styling conveys the car’s intent and your brand’s value, while the overall form dictates the car’s functionality.
Backed by our considerable automotive expertise, we create additive manufacturing solutions that enable you to optimize exterior form and function using rapid iteration, durable materials, and precise control. Maximize the appeal and performance of your vehicles with 3D printing.
Solve Your Biggest Exterior Body Challenges
Accelerate Design Validation
When refining a design, aerodynamic testing is critical to minimizing drag and effectively directing air where desired, but it often requires an incredible amount of time, effort, and investment. The body exterior and panel application eliminates the tooling expense and labor intensity of traditional prototyping by enabling parts to be built in hours so that you can quickly integrate them into the prototype for rapid iteration.
Exceptional Production Grade Surface Finish and Quality
The ability to offer a range of different surface types can help convey the studio’s intent and differentiate vehicles on the market. Our body exterior solution delivers parts with surfaces that support various post-finishing processes, such as sanding, polishing, plating, and painting. This enables you to validate parts during testing and further optimize style and performance.
Access High-Performance Materials
Traditional development processes constrain automotive designers and engineers with their limited number of available materials. In contrast, our additive solutions offer a broad portfolio of durable materials, from rigid plastics to composites and elastomerics, that have the strength, impact resistance, accuracy, and stability to suit the needs of testing and on-road experiences.
Customize Without Expensive Tooling
Limited series convey exclusivity through exterior styling and optimized performance, yet they also require expensive tooling. Our additive solutions eliminate this cost by making customization easier and more accessible, helping you burnish your brand.
Optimize the Strength, Inertia and Weight of Metal Industrial Automotive Components
Traditional manufacturing methods can constrain engineers and lead to mismatched strength-to-weight ratios, wasting energy and creating inefficiencies at the expense of performance.
Our metal additive manufacturing solution answers this challenge with an innovative set of tools and processes for managing every aspect of metal structural component production. Informed by our exhaustive process knowledge, we help you gain precise control over the strength and weight of your critical components, allowing you to manage inertia better, improve geometries, maximize performance, and enhance your manufacturing abilities.
Solutions for Metal Structural Components Challenges
Test, Iterate, and Validate Faster
Traditional automotive processes and tools can create complexities that slow testing and iteration, affecting quality and performance. In contrast, our additive manufacturing solutions allows you to design and produce components more efficiently, making it possible to validate more quickly and optimize the quality of your metal structural parts.
Manage Static, Dynamic, and Inertial Loads
Few environments stress components over long duty cycles more than the automotive environment. This is why reducing the strong rotational forces that can affect structural systems is vital to increasing performance. Our additive metal solutions include equipment, materials, software, and on-demand parts that give you the freedom to design innovative metal components capable of minimizing inertia and other dynamics.
Gain Greater Dimensional Control and Apply Packaging Innovation
Automotive designers and engineers face significant dimensional challenges when creating robust and innovative designs that reduce risks. With precise control and more flexibility, our additive solutions help your engineers overcome the challenging requirements of metal automotive components. Giving them additional design freedom also enables them to optimize packaging geometries and make maximum use of limited space.
Improve Assembly Operations
Manufacturing quality becomes more difficult to control as the number and diversity of components increase. With our metal structural component solution, you can improve parts assembly and make manufacturing more efficient by reducing the overall number of components and their variability. If needed, you can also add a wide array of post-processing capabilities by application to ensure quality control.
Optimize Fluid Flow, Package Space, and Manufacturing
Systems that must be designed for optimized fluid flow in restricted package space often require a high degree of flexibility, complexity, and/or durability that traditional manufacturing methods can’t provide.
Our additive manufacturing solution allows you to produce geometries that are neither possible nor economical with traditional methods. You can create and optimize the flow of air and other fluids that deliver the durability and performance needed to physically validate in alignment with your digital twin. In addition, innovative part consolidation capabilities reduce losses and improve the quality of these critical systems.
Solve Your Air and Fluid Handling Challenges
Improve Part Durability Under Pressure
Create physical representations of the automotive air and fluid handling components for functional evaluation and testing. These parts must not only meet the fit and form of the design intent but also functionally perform over time and test cycles to deliver value. Our 3D printing solution for air and fluid handling components provides parts that will represent design intent across the temperature, energy, and vibration of the specified environment. Duraform EX Elongation Chart
Leverage Design Freedom
Automotive fluid handling components often balance the optimization of fluid dynamics and the significant package restrictions of the vehicle. If you add further constraints based on traditional prototyping production methods, you’re left with a limited ability to maximize system performance. Parts must function at a high level within tight spaces; with our additive solution, you can deliver quality components with complex surfaces, all while packaging them into constrained spaces without worrying about how to build rapid prototypes. These can be produced in clear materials to better understand fluid performance relative to design expectations.
Deliver Systems with Fewer, Simplified Parts
Directing and managing fluids can involve complex routes and paths through space. With traditional manufacturing methods, you’re often forced to create many individual components and assemble them to produce the desired path and performance, introducing inefficiencies and potential failure points. With our 3D-printed air and fluid handling solution, you can consolidate parts, integrate other functions, and/or implement innovative connection systems to improve system quality and assembly efficiency.
Improve Assembly Operations While Reducing Tooling and Inventory Costs
Assembly operations can be complex, prone to quality issues, and unpredictable in terms of efficiency and time. Moreover, while manufacturing aids are often used to improve costs, quality, and time, they’re also prone to complexity and frequent modifications.
Our additive solutions for manufacturing aids allow production and assembly operations to optimize the assembly process while controlling manufacturing and inventory costs in the most challenging environments. You can tailor jigs, fixtures, grippers, and locators to specific processes and components and quickly iterate for continuous improvement without costly traditional tool making and burdensome inventory costs.
Solve Your Manufacturing Aids Challenges
Rigid and Durable Components
The efficiency of the assembly process relies on manufacturing aids. However, the production of automotive manufacturing aids can see significant forces, stresses, and wear over time. Our advanced materials, printing technologies, and design practices give you the confidence to adopt the most advanced manufacturing aid solutions for automotive assemblies so that you can maintain quality and maximize productivity.
Rapid Iteration for Continuous Improvement
Manufacturing aids can go through numerous iterations as production teams and industrial and manufacturing engineers improve the process; design freedom and the ability to hold tight tolerances on manufacturing aids are critical to their effectiveness. Our additive manufacturing aid solutions provide the capacity to produce iterative designs to adhere to these strict tolerances and design features, allowing teams to provide more iterations and accelerate assembly efficiency.
Efficient Inventory Management
Manufacturing aids can wear or break during production runs, requiring an inventory of replacement aids to keep assembly lines running. While traditional tool-making can produce these components, production times and costs force the tradeoff between lead time and overproduction. Our additive solutions for manufacturing replacement aids enable you to build aids quickly and on demand. You can ensure that you have the replacements needed to maintain uptime without overproduction while minimizing your traditional manufacturing costs.
.png)
Discover and Deliver Energy Systems That Transform Automotive Propulsion
Today’s sustainable automotive systems require innovative and unique solutions to not only remove energy from power systems but also find ways to utilize this energy more effectively to increase efficiency and reduce waste.
Our metal additive manufacturing solutions provide teams with the design freedom, material performance, component quality, and manufacturing flexibility needed to advance the science of sustainable mobility. We enable engineers to discover, refine, and deliver innovations to market faster, putting more energy into the wheels and not in the environment.
Solve Your Energy and Fluid Management Challenges
Design Robustness in Extreme Environments
New propulsion and drivetrain systems often involve novel designs and fluids in managing thermal energy and fluid dynamics, which means that you must utilize robust materials and physical designs to ensure consistent system performance over time. Our metal additive solutions provide the design freedom required to optimize physical performance and manage energy more efficiently in these new systems.
Manufacturing Complex Geometry
Our metal 3D printing allows engineers to design what was previously impossible to manufacture. These new energy management systems will require a high level of design freedom including thin walls and complex geometries to capture and manage energy more efficiently. Refined by years of industry experience, our solutions deliver the highest levels of design freedom across the entire manufacturing and assembly process—from initial geometry to design and post-processing—to ensure the quality and performance of intricate channels and surfaces.
Structural Performance in Harsh Environments
New powertrain and drivetrain systems face the same environmental, durability, and robustness challenges, including high temperatures, temperature cycling, chemical exposure, and high-energy vibrations, as previous vehicle systems. A broad range of metal alloys and reproducible, high-quality parts without porosity can give you confidence in your systems’ performance under the harshest conditions and environments.
Deliver Advanced Product Innovation with Higher Productivity, Higher Quality, and Shorter Lead Times
Traditional manufacturing methods often force engineers to make tradeoffs between tooling costs, part quality, and manufacturing lead times. Nevertheless, complex geometries that could improve these factors are either too difficult or too costly to implement.
Our metal additive manufacturing solutions overcome this challenge with an innovative set of tools and processes for managing every aspect of metal durable tooling. The combination of comprehensive software solutions, exhaustive process knowledge, and advanced metal 3d printing equipment and materials technologies enable you to leverage complex die inserts, apply high productivity conformal cooling, produce precision jigs and fixtures and quickly iterate on complex tools like tire molds.
Solve Your Metal Durable Tooling Challenges
Improve Tool Productivity and Part Quality
Thermal stresses on tools and hot spots can significantly degrade tool performance and part quality. However, the ability to define more complex tool features improves thermal management, thus improving the quality, productivity, and uptime. Our durable tooling solution provides the freedom including innovations like conformal cooling to optimize tool design beyond what traditional tool making processes allow.
Increase Product Design Freedom
Complexity exponentially increases the cost and time required to develop, produce, and deliver traditional tools. Constraints surrounding features such as draw directions, cooling channels, parting lines, and draft angles often produce significant limitations on the innovation of parts. Our durable tooling applications remove these traditional manufacturing constraints, giving you the engineering freedom to optimize automotive parts and systems.
Deliver Early Design Iterations More Frequently
When designing advanced automotive systems, you can use design iterations to refine and optimize performance. Physical testing, together with digital models, also provides the ability to launch products with confidence. Our solutions for metal 3D printing durable tooling enable you to significantly reduce the lead time for early physical design drafts, allowing more time for iteration, testing, and validation.
Apply Best-in-Class Digital Solutions
Our durable tooling solution provides you with software for developing and validating advanced tool designs. This software enables conformal cooling channel design, scanning, inspection/metrology, and process control solutions so that engineers and designers can efficiently innovate their metal durable tools. Our solution for durable tooling has been developed with input gathered from years of engagements and incorporates best practices from leading companies and innovative industries.
Collaborating with You to Enhance Automotive Design and Development
Solutions that Solve Automotive Challenges
Whether you require high-precision parts at scale or tough thermoplastics that replicate automotive-grade production plastic, our additive manufacturing technology is built to help you design, test, and iterate components quickly and efficiently. Reduce the time it takes to produce high-performance automotive parts from days or weeks to hours.
Accelerate Automotive Innovation
New powertrain technologies are creating exciting opportunities while producing daunting engineering challenges. With a large variety of advanced materials and additive technologies, the ability to increase testing and iteration, and greater production flexibility, our additive technology makes it easier to develop cutting-edge 3D auto components that deliver performance mobility innovations.
Leverage our Automotive and Additive Expertise
Our team provides more than just products—we also provide a holistic portfolio of solutions with the experience and expertise to help you solve automotive problems and deliver value efficiently and effectively. We can help you use our additive technology to improve the driving experience and enhance productivity in many ways, such as by reducing component parts, lowering manufacturing variability, decreasing weight, and managing packaging constraints. We are committed to giving you a competitive advantage.