Roboze
Oli Johnson speaks to Davide Schiena, Head of Application Engineering and Customer Success at Roboze, about the company’s 3D printing partnerships with MotoGP teams.
In August 2023, Roboze announced that it had signed a new agreement with Ducati Corse, the sports division of Ducati Motor Holding Group, to renew its partnership for the 2023 season. Roboze was also selected by the Monster Energy Yamaha MotoGP team in April 2023 to be the partner for the 2023, 2024, and 2025 MotoGP seasons.
The Ducati Lenovo Team, the winner of the 2022 MotoGP World Championship, has a Roboze ARGO 500 3D printer installed in its Borgo Panigale facility, and will have a Plus PRO professional 3D printer in the paddock to allow the team to accelerate its design and production processes, and optimise the performance of its bikes through the lightweighting of components.
Speaking about the benefits Roboze 3D printing is bringing to the MotoGP teams, Davide Schiena, Head of Application Engineering and Customer Success at Roboze told TCT: “The main advantage of our solution is in the material versatility. We are able to provide materials that can allow our customers to get very high performance at high temperatures with a very lightweight material. Especially if you look at carbon fibre-reinforced PEEK, or the carbon fibre-filled nylon, which is named the Carbon PA PRO. We are able to provide the highest stiffness that can be achieved with these kinds of materials. Generally, this kind of technology and these kinds of materials are mainly used for aerodynamic surfaces, so wings, flaps and things like that, and for parts that are very close to the engine and the exhaust system, so it has to withstand pretty high temperatures without having any kind of deformation or problems.”
The exhaust system on a MotoGP bike can exceed 700 °C according to Schiena, with other parts of the bike reaching temperatures of up to 300 °C. According to Roboze, a key attribute of its technology is the ability to replace metal parts with printed components made of lighter, high-performance materials.
Schiena spoke about how the teams decide which metal or carbon fibre laminate parts will be replaced with 3D printed components: “In the motorsport industry, they tend to optimise every single gram that they can save on a bike or any kind of vehicle. It’s generally more about replacing carbon fibre laminates in these cases, and that’s the reason why we had to fine-tune our technology in order to easily replace a carbon fibre sheet with our carbon PEEK or carbon PA by respecting the same thickness of the components and the same weight. This is where we brainstorm with the engineering teams.”
A printer being used to create components that will operate in high-temperature, high-performance environments needs to be reliable. For end use parts, printing, testing, validating and then, in the second iteration, getting something different from what you already tested and validated can cause problems. Roboze says it approaches 3D printing by looking at accuracy, repeatability, and process control with super polymers and composites, and tries to pack it all into a reliable industrial grade 3D printer.
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Schiena told TCT about the benefits motorsports teams are gaining using its Plus PRO 3D printer, including on the track: “The PRO line is the professional series of printers we provide that are compact devices than can be packed and taken to the tracks all over the world. That’s something that is very valuable for these teams, for Formula 1, MotoGP, Superbike, Formula E, any kind of competition, where the engineering team can listen to the feedback the driver is providing according to the weather condition or the track condition. And they can slightly change the design of some wing, or some flap to make something that is really optimised at the last second on the track.”
