Robert Grubbs
Czinger 21C
Inside the factory of an electric vehicle (EV) battery design and manufacturing company, Kevin Czinger is making some calculations.
The manufacture of these lithium-ion phosphate battery cells at Coda’s facility in China relies heavily on coal-fired power. And because of that, ‘well over' 200 kilogrammes (kg) of Co2 per kilowatt hour (kWh) is being produced in battery manufacture. At this time, kg of Co2 per kWh is the most important metric on Czinger’s mind and the cogs whirring in his head only intensify as he does the workings out to reveal that these batteries and EVs aren’t having enough impact.
“Say you take the low end of that range, 200 kilogrammes of Co2 emitted per kilowatt hour, you don’t take into account extractive emissions or any of these other things, you’re just looking at the cell factory itself – 200 times 90-kilowatt hour [for a] Tesla is 18,000 kilogrammes of Co2 emitted in the manufacture of the battery before the car is ever charged,” Czinger explains. “In comparison, a Toyota Camry driven for 80,000 miles emits, through tailpipe exhaust, 16,000 kilogrammes of Co2. I looked at that and said, ‘you fool – you think that you’re having a positive impact, but you’re only going to have a positive impact if you look at the entire system.’”
So, he has. Coda Automotive and the Miles Electric Vehicles business Czinger was previously involved with are no longer functioning, but rather than pursue ambitions as an OEM of EVs, he has taken a step sideways.
Post Coda, Czinger educated himself on lifecycle assessments, figuring only a holistic approach would return the energy emission reduction that is required in an era of climate emergency. He also came to realise that the way automotive structures are manufactured, and the costs required to do so, need optimising – particularly as EVs, hybrid cars and internal combustion engine vehicles (and all the tooling and fixturing to come with them) continue to emerge.
“The amortisation period, the competition, the driving down of values, you’re looking and saying, ‘this is environmentally and economically broken,’” Czinger says.
If you recognise Czinger’s name, you’ll know that his answer to this ‘broken’ system was to establish Divergent Technologies. In doing so, Czinger and his team developed the Divergent Adaptive Production System (DAPS) to ‘digitise and dematerialise’ automotive production and provide the technical competency for the company, in time, to become a Tier One supplier to the automotive industry. After Aston Martin’s launch of the DBR22 in August – which features an additively manufactured rear subframe – that time is now.
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DBR22
DAPS is certified against ISO 9001:2015; ISO 14001; AS 9100D; and IATF 16949:2016 standards and is comprised of generative design, additive manufacturing, and automated assembly. The combination of these three elements, Divergent believes, will ‘massively expand the design space’ with humans setting the requirements and the software optimising the structure to Pareto efficiency.
Key to the development of DAPS is a collaboration with SLM Solutions commencing in 2017. As Czinger surveyed the market for a fabrication tool that aligned with his vision, he saw
in 3D printing a ‘half invented industry’ where the printers were ‘way too slow and way too expensive.’ He recognised the potential though and convinced former SLM Solutions Chairman Hans Ihde to work with Divergent to jointly develop a 12-laser machine. Thus, the NXG XII 600 was ‘specced’ to fit the cost and rate structure of DAPS, and has now been used by Divergent for two and a half years. By the end of 2022, Divergent will have six of the machines installed, supplementing other AM technology that the company is choosing not to disclose.
What Divergent is willing to talk about, however, is how its DAPS workflow works. Its engineers start by understanding the static stiffness targets of a structure, then the typical load cases it will be exposed to, then what its boundary conditions are, then its crash requirements, durability requirements and dynamic stiffness response requirements. This information is the input for the Divergent design algorithm, which is where the company enters the concept phase. Here, Divergent gives the OEM ‘optionality’ to, for example, reduce stiffness in a certain area of the structure to reduce mass. After the concept phase comes the detailed design phase, and after that, it’s time to print the part.
“One of the many, many benefits is that those first units that we print,” Cooper Keller, Divergent’s VP, Program Management and Production Operations, explains, “are printed with production processes, production machines, production materials. So, if there are no design changes required through the rest of the programme, that is production validation.”
Divergent has had last-minute changes requested – ‘major revisions of structures’ – but instead of 12 months to scrap the part, cast the moulds and stamp the tools, it needs only to be a delay of three weeks to get the next iteration additively manufactured. The company has also seen the value in being able to validate these structures against real-world requirements in-house. Its facility not only includes the DAPS system, but also MTS multi-actuator durability rigs, a crash tower with high-speed cameras, a full materials lab, thermal testing, corrosion testing and environmental testing.
The 230 engineers and scientists in the Divergent facility are also encouraged to take inspiration from Kelly Johnson, who ran Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works operations some 60 years ago.
“They built the SR 71 Blackbird in 20 months, and they did that with 135 engineers,” Czinger says. “Here, Kelly Johnson said, ‘when we built that, everything had to be invented.’ I wouldn’t say we’ve invented everything across those three different subsystems [generative design, AM, robotic assembly], but we have to be prepared to invent everything.”
To back those words up: Divergent has 530 patent filings and patents issued across DAPS, from software to materials to machines to optics. That five years of intense R&D has caught the eye of eight automotive OEMs, most of them within the top ten major OEM groups in the world,
and one of them Aston Martin. For Aston Martin, Divergent has additively manufactured the DBR22’s rear subframe in multiple titanium pieces which are then bonded together. Though details are scant and Divergent isn’t forthcoming, Aston Martin says there was a significant weight saving with no reduction in stiffness.
DBR22 interior
Divergent is going to continue supplying Aston Martin with structures for existing and future vehicle models, while parts for multiple other brands have gone through full durability and crash testing. These programmes include structures for vehicle models that are in the volumes of dozens to those in the volumes of tens of thousands – Divergent is aiming to be ready for the latter by 2025. Czinger also says the company is working on aerospace and defence programmes.
The company believes it can achieve such volumes because of the savings made in engineering and assembly, plus the capabilities of its generative design software. But it also knows that it has to.
“Right now, we have a built world around us which is environmentally and economically and socially unsustainable. And we need to use technology in a very intentional way,” Czinger says. “We’ve gone quickly from a billion to eight billion people over a 100year period or so. We cannot use analogue processes that consume more and more material and energy and capital – we need to use our technologies to create super-efficient systems that mirror what an Alpine Meadow does. What does an Alpine Meadow do? It uses evolution in an environment where there is incredible competition for material
and energy to create a fully optimised structure. I think that is critical to our survival. We’re destroying ourselves, we’re destroying the planet, and we’ve got to create a stable economic, environmental and community system.”
So that’s the motivation, but where is the inspiration? Czinger talks about a combination of ten-printer fleets plus a 22 x 22 metre assembly module in the near term while hinting at a future where its DAPS might lean on 100, 500, or even 1,000 printers to produce structures for the world’s biggest automotive OEMs. But can it be done?
“What we’re doing is much more complex but if you look at the CNC machines of 2005/2006 – pre-Apple and Foxconn using them to manufacture microelectronics – after that, you saw a scale up from tens of machines to, [at] Foxconn, 150,000 lights out machines,” Czinger says. “Do you think they were thinking in 2005, ‘there are ten machines here now [but] we’re going to have 150,000 lights out automated [in the future]?’ I’m not trying to do this to create any kind of hype. I’m 63 years old, I’ve made money, I don’t need any of that. This is, here’s a chance to digitise and de-materialise that built world if you try to make it happen.”
This story was originally published in: TCT Europe Magazine 30.5
