Yearly, requirements group SAE Worldwide holds a contest referred to as Method SAE, wherein college students from each undergraduate and graduate packages design, construct, and race small formula-style race automobiles. For this 12 months’s occasion, the College of Southern California’s (USC) Method SAE crew partnered with the UK’s Wayland Additive, an authentic gear 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 troublesome elements to fabricate — even for typical manufacturing processes:
“The exhaust collector is the half that joins every cylinder’s exhaust into one stream and it immediately impacts engine effectivity and efficiency. …There are normally two crucial design concerns: efficiency versus manufacturing issue,” McCarthy famous. “Optimum efficiency requires optimized angles of the tubes the place the exhaust circulate meets, a sure preliminary contact of circulate.
“Manufacturing the best exhaust collector with these most well-liked angles is mostly not doable with conventional strategies, resembling welding, and there may be at all times a trade-off between [performance and manufacturing difficulty]. Through the use of AM, particularly Wayland’s NeuBeam course of, we now have been in a position to reduce the trade-off and get the most effective of each worlds.”
Notably, USC Racing first approached Wayland Additive at RAPID + TCT 2024 in Los Angeles, which befell on the finish of June. The collaborators then labored collectively remotely to design and print the ultimate half.
With the Method SAE deadline of Might 14-17, 2025, which means that USC Racing and Wayland Additive efficiently designed, examined, and built-in the titanium exhaust collector in effectively underneath a 12 months — an particularly spectacular feat contemplating it’s a part with none in depth 3D printing monitor document, at the least by way of publicly accessible data.
In line with McCarthy, the success of the ultimate half trusted the precise benefits of EBAM, particularly the decrease residual stresses on the half, in comparison with powder mattress fusion (PBF): “The warmth cycles seen and excessive vibratory setting might fracture a [PBF] half. Additionally, the small hook retaining function would have confirmed too troublesome to descale.”
Ultimately, 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 Method 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 objective for USC Racing.
Other than the engineering achievements and efficiency milestones on show right here, it’s noteworthy that this venture was solely made doable because of the supply of a digitally-based manufacturing know-how and AM’s accelerated iteration cycle. It is usually important that, because of a gathering at a commerce present, an undergraduate engineering scholar was in a position to entry a extremely area of interest, comparatively costly know-how.
All of these little particulars have been required to be introduced into concord so as 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 doable lengthy sufficient to develop their imaginations, till creativeness breaks via into actuality. It permits engineers-in-training engaged on scholar tasks to collaborate with small companies midway the world over to out-design typical mass business.
Photographs courtesy of Wayland Additive
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