As car security systems become increasingly sophisticated, thieves are turning their attention to car parts instead. This is bad news for owners of vehicles fitted with alloy wheels, but Ford now offers a way of keeping those wheels yours – and the solution is guaranteed to get car owners talking.
Continental’s Tire division is just one company division expected to benefit from the opening of a new competence centre for 3D printing. The facility, located at the Continental Engineering Services plant in Karben, Germany, offers a variety of modern 3D printing technologies, such as a Selective Laser Melting (SLM) machine, Selective Laser Sintering (SLS), Stereolithography (SLA), Digital Light Printing (DLP) and Fused Deposition Modelling (FDM).
Imagine a motorcycle tyre tread that regenerates itself with evolving sipes. How is this possible? As you eat up the miles, grooves appear and the tread pattern on the tyre increases to maintain the best possible water evacuation. That’s what XST Evo sipes do. The sipes can be found on the Michelin Road 5, the first motorcycle tyre to utilise 3D metal printing technology.
Continuing the theme of technological development, Linglong Tire – a top five Chinese tyre enterprise – exhibited a number of technological developments including its: a dandelion natural rubber-based tyre, a tyre featuring a graphene compound and a polyurethane tyre manufactured with 3D printing techniques.
Joint developmental work between Shandong Linglong Tire and the Beijing University of Chemical Technology recently bore fruit with the successful production of 3D printed polyurethane tyres. The tyre maker comments that this 3D tyre printing is a first in China.
San Francisco-based 3D printing and consulting company Emerging Objects is using waste tyres as a source material.
According to local news reports, the firm says the same characteristics that make waste tyres problematic (namely, their cheap availability, bulk and resilience) make them attractive.
