FAW-Volkswagen
Farsoon FAW Volkswagen
FAW Volkswagen air-duct functional prototyping part by Farsoon additive technology.
FAW-Volkswagen Automobile Co., Ltd, a joint venture between FAW Group, Volkswagen and Audi, has revealed it is producing prototypes for more than 5,000 parts a year with Farsoon’s Laser Sintering technology.
The company, founded in 1991 in Changchun, Jilin Province and today producing millions of cars every year, has long been a user of 3D printing for prototyping means, first adopting the Fused Deposition Modelling and Stereolithography processes, and later installing Farsoon’s HT403P machine. With Farsoon’s Laser Sintering technology, FAW-Volkswagen is building functional prototypes of components like bumper guide brackets and air ducts.
When prototyping and manufacturing the air duct component, which controls air flow into the interior of the vehicle, the main challenge is the complex hollow structure. Typically, this part would be produced with blow moulding, but when only a small batch of prototypes is required, this is an expensive process - costs could be as high as $36,000 US - and would also take up to three months to be delivered. By deploying 3D printing technology to make the air duct prototypes, FAW-Volkswagen not only reduced those costs, but also sped up the design iteration process.
“For air-duct development, no other manufacturing tool is more suited than Farsoon’s laser sintering technology,” commented Wu Hongtao, Senior R&D Engineer at FAW-Volkswagen. “Compared to traditional blow moulding and other 3D printing technologies, Farsoon Laser Sintering offers faster design-manufacturing cycle and improved cost-performance. This is invaluable to us when it comes to a tight R&D timeframe with frequent iteration cycles. We very much appreciate the stability and quality of Farsoon HT403P as a true manufacturing tool that we can count on for our future technology roadmap.”
FAW-Volkswagen
Farsoon FAW-Volkswagen
FAW-Volkswagen bumper guide brackets model.
Similar gains have been achieved across the array of 5,000 parts FAW-Volkswagen prototypes every year, including the bumper guide brackets. Not only does the company assess the time and cost taken to produce each of these prototype parts, but also the functional performance and environmental requirements. The bumper guide brackets would be typically manufactured using silicone moulds, but the multiple steps of the process would sometimes lead to reductions in part quality, meaning poor performances during load and impact testing, per FAW-Volkswagen.
The newly made prototype parts are said to demonstrate good resistance performance under temperature, optimal strength and performed well in impact testing. Using 3D printing also saw a reduction in design to physical part time from 78 hours to 14 hours and a reduction in production cost by 72%.
“Besides the significant time-saving and reduced cost, we have seen a very high yield of 99% and high pass rate from Farsoon additive manufactured functional parts,” added Hongtao. “These combined advantages make the HT403P a tool that is very well suited for functional prototyping and a favourable alternative for traditional manufacturing.”
