Collaboration with Ford Otosan
Automotive manufacturers are facing challenges when handling sheet metal panels during assembly. Hard plastic components are traditionally used in door panel racks, this rigid plastic is unforgiving and exerts excess pressure which causes surface distortion when the door panels are extracted from the racks, significantly affecting final assembly quality.
In addition, these rigid plastic components drastically degrade over time and need to be frequently replaced. Manufacturing of the door panel racks is also a costly and time consuming task, either requiring significant investment into injection moulding or one-off machining of Kestamid parts which lacks scalability, all of this negatively impacts production timelines.
The challenge was to see if additive manufactured rack supports could reduce surface defects while driving down production times and cost.
Representative Model Of The Door Rack
Not a product of Ford Otosan
Large format additive manufacturing controlled by Aibuild software enabled the production of these door panel racks in softer, flexible materials which better absorb impact and conform to the door panel shape, reducing damage to the end panel. Aibuild’s geometry optimization perfectly controls the extrusion rate and adjusts the robot speed for the sharp corners for even build. This, teamed with the in-built ability for continuous printing through automated algorithms, means Aibuild software has significantly increased the quality of the panel rack support. Additionally, with LFAM providing on-demand production and easy modification of the door rack design, production timelines are also positively impacted.
Aibuild Software Workflow
No part damage
During assembly
No machining
Just 3D printing
Durable
Flexible material
On demand production
No part storage
