Honda Joins Race for Excessive Tech 3D-Printed Steel Automotive Elements

The auto business’s thirst for 3D-printed automotive elements is heating up, and the most recent growth is a doozy. The US startup Seurat Applied sciences has simply closed a $99 million Collection C funding spherical for its new 3D-printed metallic know-how with new investor Honda on board. Returning for the Collection C spherical are different automakers and suppliers together with Porsche, Denso, and the Ventures arm of Basic Motors.

$99 Million For 3D-Printed Steel Automotive Elements

The $99 million in Collection C funding for Seurat is an efficient indication that the auto business is bullish on 3D-printed automotive elements. Additionally known as additive manufacturing, 3D printing affords the potential to avoid wasting power, scale back waste, trim manufacturing timelines, enhance throughput, and pump extra flexibility into design and supplies (try our 3D printing archive right here).

Relying on the business, 3D printing techniques additionally open up the potential to chop prices and scale back environmental impacts by downsizing factories, localizing manufacturing, and lowering the necessity for warehouse space for storing.

Seurat Applied sciences launched its investor journey again in 2016, when it raised $3.41 million in a seed funding spherical. Collection A funding adopted in 2018, with GM Ventures and Porsche amongst these chipping in for a complete of $13.5 million. The subsequent massive step was a $41 million Collection B spherical, closed in 2021.

The GM connection hit the CleanTechnica radar final 12 months, after we famous that the automaker had put up stakes in a gaggle of clear tech startups together with Seurat.

Seurat has been relatively busy since then. For the report, the Collection C spherical was spearheaded by the NV Ventures department of NVIDIA together with the climate-focused Know-how Affect Fund beneath the Capricorn umbrella.

The record of collection C buyers additionally consists of Cubit Capital, Ventures, SIP International Companions, Maniv Mobility, and Xerox Ventures.

3D Printed Automotive Elements: The Pixelation Distinction

If the identify Seurat seems like a reference to the nineteenth century French painter Georges Seurat, it’s. The post-impressionist artist was well-known for popularizing a classy pixelation system on the planet of fantastic artwork. The approach is echoed by the Seurat Applied sciences 3D printing system, as elaborately defined by the corporate’s co-founder James DeMuth in an organization weblog entry posted in February of 2021.

The brand new system arose from the problem of fabricating the response chamber for a laser-driven fusion system on the US Division of Vitality’s Nationwide Ignition Facility in California, the place DeMuth labored earlier than launching Seurat.

The reactor materials needed to be a metallic that might stand up to vast variations of temperature — together with a peak of almost 1,100 levels Fahrenheit — with out cracking.

DeMuth and his group concluded that deploying additive manufacturing on a metal nanoparticle composite was the best way to go. Nonetheless, current 3D printing strategies sacrifice velocity for precision and vice versa. The selection, as calculated by DeMuth, was to attend nearly 200 years for his or her 3D-printed metal nano-composite to come back out of the printer, or accept an inferior product.

Since neither selection was acceptable, the group selected neither.

“We would have liked to give you a strategy to scale whereas sustaining decision. We would have liked to interrupt the coupling between decision and print price,” DeMuth defined. “What higher strategy to accomplish this than to sample the laser? What if each pixel might operate as a person laser?”

Group Hug For US Taxpayers

DeMuth and his group discovered the important thing to an answer at NIF, which is run by the Vitality Division’s Lawrence Livermore Nationwide Laboratory.

The Livermore lab had beforehand developed a pixelated laser system known as OALV, or Optically Addressed Mild Valve. The system separates one laser beam into many particular person elements, relatively than making an attempt to mix completely different laser sources in a single operation.

OALV was initially developed to help the lab’s LEOPARD (Laser Vitality Optimization by Precision Changes to the Radiant Distribution) system, which gained an R&D 100 award in 2012. By 2017 the lab was selling it as a brand new, improved software for fabricating 3D-printed metallic merchandise, enabling additive manufacturing to supply bigger elements at quicker speeds with higher precision than potential with current units.

Seurat accomplished the public-private collaboration in January 2016, when it secured the know-how license from the Livermore lab for its new patented, 2.3 million pixel Space Printing know-how.

The 3D-Printed Automotive Of The Future: No matter Occurred To Native Motors?

On its half, Honda is trying ahead to the fruits of its funding in Seurat. “Seurat has an revolutionary idea and applied sciences for metallic additive manufacturing, and Honda has excessive expectations for his or her future potential,” defined Manabu Ozawa, Honda’s Managing Government Officer, in a press assertion on Monday.

Seurat already has plenty of orders for 3D-printed elements in its pipeline. Subsequent steps embrace manufacturing the Space Printing system for deployment at or close to the purpose of use, the place the shopper is situated.

If that is starting to ring some bells, it’s possible you’ll be pondering of the US startup Native Motors, which obtained help from the Vitality Division’s Oak Ridge Nationwide Laboratory in Tennessee to comprehend the imaginative and prescient of a 3D-printed electrical automotive that could possibly be fabricated and assembled in native microfactories.

Native Motors by no means received all the best way there, however a 3D-printed plane is within the playing cards. When the corporate folded its mental property was acquired by the aviation startup RapidFlight, to be used in unmanned plane.

“With this acquisition, RapidFlight good points entry to Native Motors’ intensive mental property sources, together with patents, designs, and engineering experience,” RapidFlight defined.

RapidFlight anticipates that the treasure trove of data will allow it to introduce new merchandise in a matter of weeks relatively than years, so keep tuned for extra on that.

The place’s Congress?

After all, no story about 3D-printed automotive elements could be full and not using a point out of the goings-on over on the US Home of Representatives, the place the Republican majority lastly tapped Consultant Mike Johnson of Louisiana to fill the all-important place of Speaker.

That’s fairly an attention-grabbing selection, contemplating that Consultant Johnson is broadly credited with an vital position in former President Trump’s try to overturn the 2020 election, with an help from Republican members of Congress.

That individual effort failed however the combat for energy has continued in different kinds. Because the saying goes, it ain’t over ’til it’s over…

Observe me @tinamcasey on Bluesky, Threads, Put up, LinkedIn, and Spoutible.

Picture (cropped): An elaborate 3D-printed metallic type created with new Space Printing additive manufacturing know-how (courtesy of Seurat Applied sciences).