BMW is currently celebrating the 25th anniversary of the introduction of additive manufacturing methods, better known as “3D printing”.
Today, the German manufacturer uses 3D printing methods in many different areas, such as an ergonomic tool in the vehicle assembly that protects workers against excess strains on the thumb joints, or 3D printed water pump wheels for DTM race cars.
Which, by the way, is what you’re looking at in the opening image. Anyway, BMW say that the 500th 3D-printed water pump wheel was fitting in April of this year and that it consists of an aluminum alloys – which makes it more difficult to engineer.
“The targeted use of innovative additive procedures at an early stage has made us one of the pioneers and leaders in 3D printing over the past years. At the BMW Group Technology Office in Mountain View, Silicon Valley/USA, we are now even conducting a first test run with the new CLIP (Continuous Liquid Interface Production) technology,” stated Dr. Udo Haenle, Head of Production Strategy.
These technologies play a large role when developing new vehicles such as the BMW i models, which don’t have any predecessors. What this means is that initial prototypes need to be produced in large part with additive methods.
Another area of application is, surprisingly, in BMW classic cars – especially with very old collector’s vehicles where by using a reverse-engineering method, it is now possible to generate previously unavailable components to serve as spare parts.
“Components made with additive manufacturing give us a lot of freedom in the forming process; they can be produced both quickly and in appropriate quality. We see major potential for the future application in series production as well as for new customer offerings, such as personalized vehicle parts, or the spare parts supply,” added Haenle.
One of the long term goals is to give customers the option of having individual vehicle components made according to their personal preferences.
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