"It's PLA Time at Rivian's 3D Printing Lab That Pursues a Need for Speed" - by Car and Driver

[Zoidz]

Very detailed article about how important in-house Additive Manufacturing (3D printing) has become at Rivian Michigan. The following are a few excerts:

Rivian's secret heroes: four members of the prototyping team dedicate their work to additive manufacturing (AM). They use resin, powder, and fused-deposition machines (FDM) to build ideas, parts, and jigs at the drop of a dime. Rivian uses AM to fast-track R&D, from prototyping windshields that don’t yet exist to making tools that help workers on the assembly line. And 86 percent of engineering requests are completed in five days or less, a pace made possible by constant problem-solving. AM allows Rivian to act as its own supplier for niche, low-volume pieces that could otherwise slow production. And that's why these printers keep printin'.

...Rivian runs 35 industrial 3-D printers, 28 of them Stratasys machines....

...On an average day, the fleet chews through about 95 pounds of material, most of it ASA and ABS extruded by FDM printers that never break for lunch. ...

... One team printed a transparent electric motor, filled it with oil, and despite being a totally plastic/transparent part, they got the motor spinning at up to 50 mph on a dyno, where they were able to view the oil flow through its transparent material. Another job produced a full R1 drive unit, printed continuously for seven days, long before castings existed....

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[SadHill]

Hopefully they don’t burn out the employees and they leave for another company.
sounds like they are valuable to Rivian

 

[Nixapatfan]

I would have been shocked if they didn't use 3d printers, I guess good publicity for Rivian but otherwise a pointless story.

 

[COdogman]

Wow. 86% of engineering requests are completed in 5 days or less. I’m curious what some of our engineers here think, but that sounds impressive!

 

[beatle]

Kinda depends on what an "engineering request" is. If it is to get coffee, I am not impressed.

I guess "fix PaaK" is in the 14% that goes over 5 days.

Otherwise it is an interesting story. The use of transparent filament to study oil flow is clever and is a different advantage for 3d printing beyond mockups of parts to be cast or shaped out of metal or injected molded plastic.

 

[Spork8]

Wow. 86% of engineering requests are completed in 5 days or less. I’m curious what some of our engineers here think, but that sounds impressive!

Not enough information, tbh. If they're sending a print and asking it to be printed, seems like they're volume is low. If they aren't sent a print and they need to do that design, then this is impressive.

 

[mkhuffman]

I would have been shocked if they didn't use 3d printers, I guess good publicity for Rivian but otherwise a pointless story.

You think it is pointless, but I have not been involved in any manufacturering process for 25 years. I love reading about how Rivian is using 3d printing technology to improve their process.

So this is interesting to me. And exciting. It makes me hope some of the grand innovations we read about daily might actually make it into a product we can buy. Instead of years, in might be weeks or months. And maybe, maybe that Gen3 will have 800V charging and a 180 kWh pack.

 

[VandalSibs]

I guess "fix PaaK" is in the 14% that goes over 5 days.

Yeah, these are not software engineers. Different teams.

 

[R1Thor]

Wow. 86% of engineering requests are completed in 5 days or less. I’m curious what some of our engineers here think, but that sounds impressive!

Additive Manufacturing has changed the landscape of 'fail fast' and prototype, pivot, and run so much in the past couple of decades. I came out of school thinking that a nominal development cycle was measured in years (for complex projects) because of the amount of analysis required to validate an idea. To now: I have a verily similar workflow. Design and concept it, give it the ol sniff test, and then prototype it fast and see what works and what doesn't, pivot, iterate and eventually come up with the thing we're 99.99% confident in. THEN we make that and test the heck out of it.

It's different times.

That said, it's all about scale. I don't work for a company valued like Rivian, so my turnaround is still significantly greater than 5 days. But it's still several of orders of magnitude faster than my predecessors.

I love it!

 

[savethemanual]

And maybe, maybe that Gen3 will have 800V charging and a 180 kWh pack.

180 kWh battery pack!?! Not the direction EV's should be going, how about increased efficiency and faster DCFC....which 800v architecture will do.

 

[R1Thor]

180 kWh battery pack!?! Not the direction EV's should be going, how about increased efficiency and faster DCFC....which 800v architecture will do.

Not here to start an argument, but... kWh is a measure of energy.

If you increase energy density, why not add more energy to the system? Like, sincerely? No one said 'make a heavier battery,' but I foresee a future where we could (easily) have twice the potential energy stored at half the current weight.

No reason to limit one variable. None.

 

[savethemanual]

Not here to start an argument, but... kWh is a measure of energy.

If you increase energy density, why not add more energy to the system? Like, sincerely? No one said 'make a heavier battery,' but I foresee a future where we could (easily) have twice the potential energy stored at half the current weight.

No reason to limit one variable. None.

I hear you, and realistically the higher energy density will come with SSB. But even then, with increased efficiency, less resources used with a smaller kWh capacity pack yet still deliver range expected for a vehicle of it's class is a good thing.

 

[Zoidz]

I would have been shocked if they didn't use 3d printers, I guess good publicity for Rivian but otherwise a pointless story.

It provides interesting information to a wide variety of readers here:
- For those that are investors, it illustrates that Rivian is solving problems efficiently and cost effectively
- For those with no state of the art manufacturing exposure, it shows what can be done and how prototyping and "fix it ASAP" has been positively impacted by AM.
- For those who work in manufacturing but have not had exposure to AM, it illustrates the game changing nature of the technology and might spark some innovative ideas.
- For those of us that are using AM technology for business purposes, it's interesting to see what others are doing, what machines they use, their workflow, how they are creatively applying the technology, etc.

Like Rivian on a much smaller scale, I have designed and printed more than a dozen spacers, shims, and replacement and modification parts for our production line - overnight - that would have taken days or weeks to resolve otherwise.

Pointless? Not as pointless as your pointless comment, lol.

 

[beatle]

Not here to start an argument, but... kWh is a measure of energy.

If you increase energy density, why not add more energy to the system? Like, sincerely? No one said 'make a heavier battery,' but I foresee a future where we could (easily) have twice the potential energy stored at half the current weight.

No reason to limit one variable. None.

You could add more energy to the system, and some platforms will, but automakers could also make gas tanks a lot bigger. They generally don't because keeping that much energy in reserve that is never used is bad for cost, efficiency, packaging, (and for EVs, L2 charging). SSBs promise roughly twice the energy density, so you'd get twice the energy at the same weight, not half the weight. I'd rather have the same energy at half the weight. As a fan of small, lightweight cars, I think this is the killer app of SSBs, not 700 miles of range. People who tow probably feel differently, but very few vehicles are even capable of towing.

 

[BigSkies]

Not here to start an argument, but... kWh is a measure of energy.

If you increase energy density, why not add more energy to the system? Like, sincerely? No one said 'make a heavier battery,' but I foresee a future where we could (easily) have twice the potential energy stored at half the current weight.

No reason to limit one variable. None.

I'm not arguing your point, because it is valid. But all of the factors matter too.

User experience in an EV is the combination of range, charging speed, and efficiency.

A Silverado EV pulling up to a 6kW L2 charger at a hotel is only going to fill ~25% of the battery overnight. A midsize CUV will fill up 100% of the battery overnight. A Rivian is roughly midway between those two extremes.

There's also the factor of cost, which is one of the biggest variables in terms of overall EV adoption.

Let's say future technology delivers an EV with a magical 1,000 miles of range. That's great, but it would still be pretty expensive. $/kWh may or may not improve with higher density.

But what if that same energy density allows building a 300 mile range EV at a significantly lower price than today's batteries? That's what would really sell.

Improvements to energy density, charging speed, and efficiency will allow for EV's to exist that hit different target customers in different ways. And that's what matters most.

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