SIKA: Accelerating Automotive Innovation with INTAMSYS 3D Printing

INTAMSYS has partnered with KEXCELLED to provide advanced 3D printing solutions for SIKA's Automotive Division in China. SIKA, a prominent automotive component supplier, offers comprehensive adhesive, shock absorption, sealing, and structural enhancement solutions, helping OEM clients create lighter, stronger, safer, quieter, and more eco-friendly vehicles.

Traditional manufacturing methods in the automotive industry often involve lengthy and costly processes for prototype development and verification. The need for rapid iterations and frequent design changes posed significant challenges, especially under tight timelines.

3D printing is also used for making the plenum for a turbo engine. Seen on the left of the below pictures is composite tooling for the part, first printed in a few segments, then joined together with the entire surface carefully polished. The one on the right is a final, high-performance product made out of the composite tooling after it went through the whole carbon fiber process of laying and curing.

In the selection of 3D printing materials, KEXCELLED PAHT K7 has stood out thanks to its characteristics of high rigidity, high performance, and ease of use. The material has a fracture elongation of 21-25%, with good toughness and excellent impact strength; The elastic modulus ranges from 4600 to 4800Mpa, demonstrating high rigidity and remarkable load-bearing capacity. In addition, it has low creep performance, is not prone to deformation, and maintains good accuracy. Thanks to these characteristics, the 3D-printed parts using KEXCELLED PAHT K7 continuously meet many of the various requirements for automotive components. Looking past the raw print off the build tray, the sound adhesion property of the material allows it to easily form composite structures and components for specific functions with other materials, This enables many of those important attributes mentioned earlier such as sound insulation, noise reduction, and being shockproof.

It is evident that the KEXCELLED PAHT K7 material, with its outstanding properties, has extremely high requirements for the printing ability of the equipment, which needs to address the water absorption effect of nylon while meeting the printing temperature requirements. As an industrial-grade dual nozzle high-temperature 3D printing equipment, the INTAMSYS FUNMAT PRO 410 features a format printing size of 305 * 305 * 406mm, equipped with wire sealing and drying technology and multi-material coverage ability. It prints PA engineering plastics with extremely high accuracy and quality, producing detailed and high-quality prints which accurately reproduce the design model of automotive components.

Based on the optimization and strict testing of the KEXCELLED PAHT K7 material process parameters, INTAMSYS has maximized its performance advantages, helping SIKA to quickly and repeatedly verify their design while also changing plans of the BIW cavity noise isolation and structural enhancement components, thus greatly reducing the risk and cost of verifying and changing molds. Most importantly, the 3D-printed components are directly used for prototype verification, shortening both the time for component design modification and the entire vehicle development cycle.