How motorsports benefits from additive manufacturing

Additive manufacturing has long been used in automotive, especially in racing. AM enables designers to make fast changes when faced with rapidly changing regulations and short design times. What are some of the lessons learned by those who work with motorsports and what can you gain from their experiences? Kevin Baughey,?3D systems?segment leader, transportation motorsports shares some of his experiences.

Q: What are some innovations that additive has enabled in the motorsports field?

Baughey:

The way that I like to view the entire industry is that it’s about transforming energy. If you think about the premise that you’re starting with a propulsion system that gives a certain amount of energy, the team’s objective is to take and maximize that energy and use it as best they possibly can. When you look at the applications important in motorsports, they’ve been centered on either the production of or the management of that energy. And I would say that the second piece has been really where we’ve spent a lot of time and innovation, at least from our perspective, which would be managing some of the aerodynamic forces and managing some of the air and fluid flow within the vehicle.

If you look at just the fundamentals, one of the biggest areas in the aerodynamic side using a wind tunnel is obviously maximizing downforce, minimizing drag, and so on. The teams have spent a lot of time in leveraging applications, leveraging materials, processes and developing around minimizing drag. In air and fluid handling, a similar kind of aspect is going to be about taking air from one portion of the vehicle, and run it through a lot of ducting, which can be very convoluted spaces. To read more, click here.