On display at the recent Additive Manufacturing Users Group (AMUG) and RAPID + TCT conferences was a motorcycle. But it wasn’t just any ordinary motorcycle; it had been specially designed by a collaboration of ECOSSE Moto Works, a manufacturer of luxury, limited-production motorcycles; ParaMatters, a leader in autonomous topology optimization and generative lightweighting design; and Renishaw, leading manufacturer of advanced metal additive manufacturing systems. The goal of the project was to lightweight the upper mounting bracket of the motorcycle without hurting the structural performance.
The partners decided to go with additive manufacturing for the redesign, using Renishaw’s metal powder bed fusion technology.
“We wanted to achieve significant lightweighting,” Michael Bogomolny, PhD, Co-Founder, and CTO of ParaMatters, told 3DPrint.com. “Generative design by ParaMatters, which the best in a class, generates very effective and high-performance designs. These designs are usually very organic shapes and the only way to realize these designs is AM.”
The original mounting bracket was designed for subtractive manufacturing and made from aluminum. The mass of the original part was 823 grams. First, the team evaluated the loading scenario and validated the performance of the original design. Next, they had to detect and sketch the available design space where the new optimized bracket could be located, and the non-design features that should be preserved in the re-design process were identified.
Read more: 3D Printed Motorcycle Part Produced with Generative Design
thumbnail courtesy of 3dprint.com
