China FAW Group Co., Ltd., (FAW) has formally opened its Additive Manufacturing (AM) Innovation Center in Changchun, the capital of Northeast China’s Jilin Province. The center, billed as a “Super Printing Factory”, is the country’s first automotive-focused AM platform.
An interior view of the Additive Manufacturing Innovation Center. [Photo/sasac.gov.cn]
The center runs eight mainstream manufacturing processes across 43 industrial-grade printers, capable of annually producing roughly 19,000 parts that can be used in the whole industrial chain, including research and development validation and low-volume production.
The core value of additive manufacturing lies in three aspects: having no constraints in structural design frees engineers’ imagination; zero waiting time for validation and upgrading significantly shortens the R&D cycle; and integrated structure formation dramatically enhances production efficiency.
FAW has put the technologies into practice. For Hongqi's Golden Sunflower luxury sedan product line, FAW has paired 3D-printed interior components with leather wrapping and smoke-tanning techniques, cutting roughly 30.59 million yuan ($4.55 million) from the production costs compared with conventional methods. In terms of mechanical performance, the vehicle parts built via selective laser melting, including single-cylinder engine heads and catalytic converter end cones, can nicely match the cast parts. The center has also precisely replicated some types of heritage vehicles.
Notably, FAW positioned the AM center as an infrastructure that can provide its subsidiaries with thousands of tooling and validation parts annually. From technological development to mass application, the corporation is reshaping the vehicle manufacturing processes.
(Executive editor: Zuo Shihan)
