CapaciCar - Tomorrow's Technology Today

Last time we spoke to you we were in the process of looking into 3D printing the node structures and had just sent away for a test part to be printed. Well it came back from the labs and we finally got to see it! The quality wasn’t quite what we expected…

The layers had not bonded together very successfully, and the internal holes were all wonky shapes. The poor quality was attributed to the printer being new to the department so the technicians were still working out the kinks. The DMEM department has printers that have been working for much longer so we had another test node printed from there. This node came back with a much higher quality finish to it.

Before these parts were printed it wasn’t certain that this method of chassis construction was going to work, so to figure this out each node was destructively tested. This was the fun part! Each node was held in a vice with a moment arm placed in one of the holes.

Masses were applied to the end of the lever until the nodes cracked. The node printed in the Mech Eng department failed during the placement of the first 1kg mass.

The DMEM node however managed to hold more than 20kg of mass before failing!

What a success! This was a much higher load that was anticipated to exist in the chassis so the 3D printing was given the go ahead as our best method for chassis manufacture. Providing the nodes were printed by the DMEM department…