Whether on or off the track, speed is the key to success, and the power behind it is strong engineering design and manufacturing capabilities. The competition is intensifying, and the design and manufacture of parts are also facing enormous challenges. Take the turbocharger, the primary equipment for speed improvement, as an example. The turbocharger in the racing field has extremely complex shapes, geometric features, and materials. As such, investment casting was the only method ever available, but its shortcomings and limitations are just as obvious.
The racing car needs to improve its competitiveness. It must make the key parts achieve higher performance under the principle of simple design, and requires a precise balance of force. This inevitably requires frequent design changes and accordingly requires a flexible and efficiency. The production process, which is the complicated investment casting process, cannot be satisfied. The more processes there are, the higher the risk of error, the greater the chance of defects, and the longer the production cycle. In order for the turbocharger to work efficiently, it must be effectively insulated, and the double-wall structure is used to form an air gap to avoid the internal heat transfer to the casing. However, the problem with the double-wall structure is that it is difficult to cast.
In order to maintain the ideal working pressure, we need to exhaust through two wastegates. The casting method is to manufacture the main casing and the two wastegates separately and then carry out subsequent assembly, which significantly increases the cost and weight. The weight reduction of the engine is another challenge, the average design speed of the car is more than 200 km/h, and the weight reduction can greatly improve the performance. Therefore, the wall thickness of all parts should be as thin as possible to reduce the weight of the engine, but the strength of thin-walled castings is insufficient.
In addition, although the casting process can also form many complex internal geometric features or functional surfaces, basically the manufacturing cycle is relatively long. Moreover, some shape casting cannot be formed, such as geometric features in closed cavities that cannot be formed by casting methods, nor can they be formed in subsequent processing. Therefore, when we design the turbocharger in the early stage, we will be limited by the casting process.
Investment casting has many process links and a long production cycle, which makes it difficult to meet the fast-paced requirements of racing cars. Further improvements in performance require the use of more advanced technology to enable the car to set new lap records.
Compared with the investment casting method, the F1 racing car parts produced by metal 3D printing provide manufacturers with obvious advantages in time cost and manufacturing cost. A growing number of high-end automakers are using additive manufacturing in production to quickly and reliably achieve their manufacturing goals.