3 ms·
From the article: >they weigh 10 percent less than their forged equivalents and feature an integrated and closed cooling duct in the piston crown that's appare
by Jerry2 6y ago
From the article:
>they weigh 10 percent less than their forged equivalents and feature an integrated and closed cooling duct in the piston crown that's apparently unable to be reproduced using traditional manufacturing methods. The decrease in weight and temperature results in an extra 30 horsepower on top of the GT2 RS's already mighty 700.
So.. 10% less weight and ~4% increase in performance. But what about the increase in price? 3D printing is magnitudes slower than forging and probably many times more expensive. I guess some Porsche owners would gladly pay for these improvements.
- throwgeorge 6y agothe GT2 RS has a base price of $294,250. I doubt these pistons cost any increment that anyone that buys a porsche will care.
- coliveira 6y agoSome people who care about car performance would gladly pay twice the price to get that 4% increase.
- stanfordkid 6y agoYeah, 30hp is a lot, esp considering the weight is reduced.
- alfalfasprout 6y agoIt's not only HP necessarily either. Lighter pistons could also improve responsiveness. You're accelerating less mass so that could mean a nicer torque curve if you increase weight savings in the moving parts of the drivetrain.
- missedthecue 6y agoDoes it really matter? If it costs say an extra $500 per piston will people really not buy that $290k car?
- elif 6y agothe real cost is the calculated odds of a thrown rod destroying a $30k engine. I suspect that is why this will be economical in racing applications.
- bitexploder 6y agoThese are limited edition cars. A relative handful are made. That’s often where a manufacturer goes to more customized tooling and parts. Keep in mind Porsche owners of these types of cars will often easily spend 20-50k usd customizing the most minute details such as stitching color of the seatbelt, etc. Factoring a few thousand extra dollars in engine cost is easy.
- DavidPeiffer 6y ago>Factoring a few thousand extra dollars in engine cost is easy. Totally get your point from the rest of the comment, but we could be seeing notably more expense from this. 2015-2017 I was working in a university research lab and we had an industry partner with a metal printer. They said a piece 10 inches long and 3 inches in diameter had an all-in cost of 5-8k, depending if it was steel or titanium. I never saw a detailed breakdown of the costs they accounted for, and hope we see these manufacturing costs continue to drop. There is a lot of challenge making the powder good for 3d printing. Tons of requirements around the size and shape - not being perfectly spherical, not being too long, etc. My understanding is this leads to much of the high material cost.
- taylodl 6y agoI would assume it would be for racing, not consumers. They didn't mention cost, but looking at the process, time and materials involved I'd bet you're looking at tens of thousands of dollars. I don't see consumers going for that, but GT racing clubs? Oh yeah!
- bitexploder 6y agoI can see some overlap on the extreme consumer end [their 300K 700hp car is probably hundreds produced at most. The profits are already really high on those vehicles so I am curious if/when/how they will release and price this tech, or if it is just some random Porsche team drumming up some marketing for mostly vaporware :)
- shiftpgdn 6y agoGT2 RS is already close to $200,000USD (If you can even get one.) Also ask around on Rennlist how many GT2 owners have popped the motor requiring a full replacement in the first 10,000 miles.
- alfalfasprout 6y agoTrue price is waaaaaaaaaay more than that. Nobody pays retail for an RS spec car nowadays. Not to mention once you add options, that's another $100k+.
- thereisnospork 6y agoPrice difference for relatively low run orders probably isn't that bad. I'd estimate 3d printing costs to be on the order of 250-400$/piston in quantity before post print machining for OD and wrist pin tolerance.
- rco8786 6y agoIt’s Porsche not Honda.
- swagonomixxx 6y agoWell put. In general, the concerns for "massive scale" manufacturing that manufacturers like Honda and Toyota have are simply not shared by Porsche, who are known over their entire existence to manufacture < 1000 cars for a lot of their models.
- adrianmonk 6y ago> 3D printing is magnitudes slower than forging Suppose you wanted to mass produce 3D printed parts as cheaply as possible. Would there be opportunities to scale up the speed of printing? One thought is to steal an idea from traditional (2D, paper) printers. A traditional dot matrix printer has a head which sweeps side to side, but there are much faster printers called line matrix printers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_matrix_printer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_matrix_printer) which essentially have a head the width of the entire page, so it prints one entire row of pixels in one fell swoop. (One such printer is the IBM 6400. Video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnPBWru2Ecg#t=6m57s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnPBWru2Ecg#t=6m57s) One could imagine a similar approach with 3D printing with a wide print head that prints an entire row at once instead of a point. Maybe there could be other optimizations or economies of scale as well. Obviously R&D costs would be high, so you'd probably only do it if you could use for more than just pistons in one low-volume model of car.
- swimfar 6y agoFor some types of 3d printing where the material is laid down in a bead, the path of the nozzle has an effect on the resulting part. So having a wide row of nozzles would give you less flexibility in the design. But this may have less of an effect on certain metal 3d printing technologies. For example, that could work very well for some metal sintering methods. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_laser_sintering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_laser_sintering What I find facinating about 3d printing is how much unexplored area of research there is. Not only is there so much more to explore, a lot of it is very accessable without lots of money or technology. This is especially true on the sofware/gcode/slicing side of things.
- fermienrico 6y agoNo one is talking about what Forging does to the grain boundaries and consequently increasing the strength of the material. There is also shot peening which is like case hardening but with little balls of steel. Usually done on piston rods and turbine blades. I don't think 3D printing can do these things, but I hope to be proven wrong some day.
- sbayeta 6y agoMolds are expensive, so you have to spread the cost over many produced units. Probably if not many cars are made, cost isn't very different. Regarding the extra 30hp, I think they probably come from the ability to slightly increase the RPMs because of the weight reduction.