- We've all heard the saying,
"If it ain't broke, don't fix it".
Apparently there's a German company out there
that doesn't speak English,
(gasping) called Porsche.
They recently developed a way to 3D print a piston,
changing a design that's over 300 years old.
That's older than toilet paper.
Just think about that for a second.
Pistons have been around longer
than we've been wiping our butt with paper.
So what I wanna know
is how is Porsche's piston of the future
different from the ones inside your car.
And maybe more importantly,
why fix what ain't broke?
Let's go
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- To understand why these new pistons are such a big deal,
we need to take a closer look
at what happens to ordinary pistons in cars
like yours and mine and how they are made.
The piston is the first component in a chain of parts
that converts the directional force
of that combustion energy
into a mechanical rotational force.
And a single piston will be exposed
to billions of these combustions during its life.
So how powerful is that release of energy from a combustion?
Well, at 6000 RPM and at full throttle,
each piston is exposed
to nearly 10 tons of force every 0.02 seconds.
A lot of energy released from combustion is heat energy
and the pistons are traveling at up to 27 meters per second,
creating even more heat from friction.
They reach temperatures up to 310 degrees C.
And to survive such extreme punishment,
a piston has to be made from something really tough,
and typically that means
a really high quality aluminum alloy.
So are Porsche's revolutionary new pistons
made from some space age material instead?
Or maybe some sort of carbon ceramic or carbon fiber?
NASA, they actually have a patent
on a carbon ceramic piston design,
but it's estimated they cost around $4,000 to manufacturer,
which wouldn't be practical for us normal boys and girls
like you and I.
So Porsche's new pistons, they're not made out of
some Sci-Fi super pricing materials.
Like nearly every automotive piston today
they're made from an aluminum alloy.
But how they are made is something very new.
Now, there are a couple of ways we can make pistons.
We can cast them, we can forge them or we can machine them.
A casting involves heating a metal until it's liquid
and pouring it into a mold,
it's kind of like jello.
Or if you had a Creepy Crawlers machine from the 90's.
I love making Creepy Crawlies.
Now, these pistons can have complex shapes
with Val pockets, ring grooves and cooling galleries
without a lot of expensive finishing.
And casting, it's quick and inexpensive,
and that's why your street car probably has cast pistons.
Now, forging is slower and more expensive
but creates stronger parts.
Forging takes a heated billet of metal
and presses it into the desired shape.
Because you're not melting the billet into a liquid,
the metal maintains the grain
from which the billet was formed.
Much like the grain in a piece of wood,
that internal layering adds toughness.
And because of this forged pistons are more ductile,
which means they deform instead of breaking under stress.
A good example of this is getting a switch off a tree
that's nice and new,
it's really supple and it moves,
so when it whacks your leg
it hurts like a mother (beep).
Now, maintaining ductility comes at a price.
Forge pistons expand and contract
more under temperature changes.
That means forge pistons can be loose in the cylinders
when the engine is cold.
This produces what's called piston slap
as they rattle around.
Until the pistons get warm back up enough to seal properly,
they simply can't contain the combustion
inside the cylinders.
So if Porsche isn't using
any of these more traditional techniques in making a piston,
how are they doing it?
Well, they went with a technique
that uses metal dust and freaking lasers.
The process is called Laser Metal Fusion.
A type of 3D printing based on precision welding.
Porsche's process uses a proprietary aluminum alloy
called M174+.
Plus means it's freaking better.
And that proprietary aluminum alloy,
it comes as a powder
which is distributed in a thin layer
inside a highly specialized 3D printer
from another German company, frigging Germans man.
And a 12-hour process, 1200 layers,
each less than one 10th of a millimeter thick
are micro welded by robotic lasers.
And since the metal particles
are bonded at such a fine scale,
the powder has to be incredibly pure,
precisely mixed and perfectly welded
to avoid imperfections or weakness.
The piston's final step is Quality Control
at yet another German company called Zeiss,
known for their precision optical systems.
And at Zeiss, each piston is examined
with an electron microscope in CT scans
to make sure they're free of any invisible
or internal defects.
This whole process involves a lot of attention to detail.
And it's not just because these are German engineers.
Oh, no, ordinary pistons
are subjected to pressures at over 2000 PSI.
Temperatures that can melt pure lead
and accelerations from 0-60
and back to zero in 3.4 thousands of the second.
You wanna know how fast that is?
It's this fast.
Okay, but hang on,
if ordinary cast or forged pistons can withstand that,
why go to all the trouble of doing something different?
Is it just because the technology is out there and exist?
Well, the reason why Porsche's piston
uses this new manufacturing technique
is because they can't be produced by forging or casting.
Their unique design is what makes them truly futuristic.
Porsche's pistons are designed
using topological optimization.
That's when a 3D schematic of a part
is entered into a computer, which then simulates
where the load will occur on that particular part.
The computer modifies the design
to remove any unneeded material.
And the result is called a bionic architecture.
Based on the idea that nature,
it doesn't waste any resources when it produces a structure.
If you wanna learn more about this,
you should check out our video
on AI Designing Parts for Car right here,
click right there.
Porsche topological optimization
led to a piston design that is 10% lighter.
Now that might not seem like much
when it comes to 300 grand piston,
but the rapid direction changes they experience
inside an engine means that a piston can be exposed
to 200 G's of acceleration and deceleration force.
That gives a 300 grand piston
an effective mass at around 60 kilograms.
And under normal conditions,
that's enough to warp the solid steel risk pin
that connects the piston to the connecting rod.
So, Porsche's 10% weight loss plan is a big deal.
And part of the results are visible on the underside,
which contains less material than a typical piston.
And it kind of looks like the inside of a ear.
Check out my ear, okay, that's my ear,
Ear, piston.
They're like pretty much the same thing.
Now, you couldn't machine those shapes
into a forge or cast piston,
but it would take a lot of time and a lot of precision.
And even more weight is saved within the piston itself,
some of which is built into a honeycomb like structure.
Topological optimization
reveals that excess material exists here
in an ordinary piston,
but fully enclosed hollow spaces like these
are impossible to create with forging or casting alone.
3D printing also allows for a better cooling gallery
to be placed in the piston.
Topological optimization shows exactly
where oil should be squirted into the piston
to cool the areas under greatest load,
producing an overall drop in operating temperature
of 20 degrees C.
Cooling galleries like this one
are difficult to create with casting
and impossible to create with forging.
You wanna know the other way
you can have some cooling power?
Joining the Donut Underground
- You need Alexis first aid kit?
- [Man] Wow, I bet those bandaids are expired?
(laughing)
- Listen, I don't think bandaids expire, right?
That's not a thing that's expirable.
- So is this stripped down bionic structure reliable?
Well, there's some reasons
to worry that it might not be.
The 3D printing process doesn't create the grain
that gives a forged piston it's strength.
So Porsche really needed to know
how strong their new pistons are,
so they use the 700 horsepower twin-turbo 3.8-liter engine
from their 911 GT2 RS to find out.
On a test bench, they ran a GT2 RS motor
with these new pistons for 200 hours.
They simulated the conditions of a 24-hour race,
including refueling stops and multiple poles from a stop
to the 7300 RPM red line.
They then ran the engine under varying acceleration
and deceleration loads for 25 hours.
They even left the engine running at full load
for 135 hours.
Then they removed the pistons and had Zeiss reexamined them,
guess what?
They didn't find any defects.
So what does a 10% weight savings
and 20 degrees extra cooling mean for performance?
Well, lighter pistons mean that the engines red line
could be safely increased by 300 RPM.
(indistinct) pistons meet uncontrolled detonation
in the cylinders is also less likely.
And then a GT2 RS motor,
that extra RPM and modified ignition timing
combined for an extra 30 peak horsepower.
But Porsche isn't stopping yet.
They say they've been conservative so far
with producing material on the pistons
and making changes to the engine.
They even ran some simulations that suggest
that they could see 20% more weight reduction
in future versions.
More weight reduction means that other engine components,
like the dampeners that control piston vibrations,
those can also be made lighter.
And you get lighter parts,
you can rev up quicker and you can make-
- Are you serious dude?
Nah, come on it's (indistinct) episode.
- Go ahead.
- More power baby.
- Yeah.
- So, when can you buy a production car
with bionic 3D printed pistons?
Porsche says that they're less than a decade away.
10 years, what the (beep), I gotta wait 10 years.
Porsche says that they're less than a decade away.
But these experiments aren't just changing
the future of GT2 buyers,
engineers at MAHLE who helped develop porches piston
say they'll soon be able to produce the pistons
and other components in small numbers,
quickly and on demand.
Because they won't need to make
or stock expensive forging equipment or molds.
Not only can they reproduce parts for old cars
but they can improve performance parts
for nearly any car by using topological optimization.
Thank you guys so much for watching this episode of B2B.
We're here every Tuesday,
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Till next week, bye for now.