MT Magazine March/April 2023

ADDITIVE ISSUE

14

In December 2020 GM opened the 15,000-square-foot Additive Industrialization Center at the Tech Center. It was equipped with 24 machines of various types, including selective laser sintering (SLS), selective laser melting (SLM), fused deposition modeling (FDM), and Multi Jet Fusion. Here the objective is, as the name implies, the productionizing of the processes. Shabbir said that what they want to do is “find a home” for the equipment in manufacturing facilities throughout the GM organization, places where the equipment can be applied. An example of the benefits of rapid prototyping: The process was used to develop brake duct designs for the Corvette C8, and it took nine weeks’ time and 60% of the cost out.

While the whole undertaking is small batch (no more than six vehicles will be in production at any one time) and artisanal, GM is not overlooking contemporary tech for the vehicle, which includes some 300 approved and pending patented technologies and processes, from the tech of the propulsion system to connectivity. In the manufacturing arena, they will be using six large precision sand-cast elements (GM refers to them as “mega castings”) for the vehicle underbody, each of which is said to reduce part count by 30 to 40 components. And it should be no surprise that they are utilizing additive manufacturing for the CELESTIQ build. Additive Infrastructure Building the car at the GM Tech Center is certainly conve nient when it comes to additive. In 2019 in the Cole Engineering Center, the central engineering building on the Tech Center campus, the 4,000-square-foot Additive Innovation Lab was opened. While some companies might have hidden the lab away from crowds, GM put the lab in an area with considerable foot traffic and worked to engage people who expressed interest in what was going on because there was an understanding that while additive would be important, it wasn’t something that a lot of people were familiar with. Ali Shabbir, a GM engineer who focuses on additive, described the Additive Innovation Lab as a “maker space.” With interest in the tech, there could be interest in finding new applications among the engineers who happened to walk by and see the roughly 14 machines in action. While the Additive Innovation Lab is something of an idea generator, GM added to the site something that would put ideas into something more substantial.

(Image: Steve Fecht for GM)

‘Rapid Prototyping’ Like many companies in industries from aerospace to medical devices, GM has been using 3D printing – a term used for the prototyping stages (which explains why there is also the synonymous term “rapid prototyping”) as distinct from addi tive manufacturing (which is more serial production) – for a