...
Say, you wanted to make a steel engine within a machine operating volume 3
feet wide on a side. This would require 3^3 = 27 of the current machines
(or a single one scaled up this size.) Say, the engine weighed 270 kilos,
that's 270,000 grams. Say the weight is equally distributed among the 27
machines, so 270,000/27 = 10,000 grams for each machine.
The density of steel is about 8 gms/cm3. So that's 10,000/8 = 1,250 cm3.
This would then take 1,250/8,200 =.15 hours, or 9 minutes to make the
complete engine.
It's notable in this video the company's chief engineer says their system
could be scaled up to make an automobile chassis:
VIDEO: How Additive Manufacturing Can Produce Metal Parts en Masse. James
Anderton posted on June 06, 2017 |
http://www.engineering.com/AdvancedM...-en-Masse.aspx
One imagines also, it could be scaled up to make the complete automobile.
I was estimating that size of the engine based on cited high horsepower for
the Tesla cars. But I was surprised the mass and volume required for the
Tesla electric motor is much smaller than a comparable gasoline engine. This
video makes a comparison of a Tesla electric motor to a typical gas engine.
The power to weight ratio is 10 times better for the Tesla electric motor(!)
How does an Electric Car work ? | Tesla Model S.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SAxXUIre28&t=220s
The video gives the weight of the Tesla motor as 31.8 kg for 270 kW of
power. The size of the motor visually looks like it just might fit within
the 14"x14"x14" manufacturing box of the DeskTop Metal's Production machine,
though the rotor's central driveshaft might have to be produced at an angle
to make use of the full diagonal length of sqrt(3)*14" = 24" inside the
box. So instead of needing 27 of the machines I estimated before, we might
be able to make it with just a single one:
For a 32 kg = 32,000 gm engine say of steel with a density of 8 gm/cm^3,
this is 32,000/8 = 4,000 cm^3. At a production rate of about 8,000 cm^3 per
hour, the Tesla engine could be produced in about a half-hour by this single
machine.
Bob Clark
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