Cases
Lear Automotive saves time and money with metal plating technology
Thanks to Materialise’s unique combination of Mammoth stereolithography and Metal Plating service, Lear automotive is able to perform trimming trials on metal frames of car seat prototypes in a cost efficient way, with representative thicknesses of the final frame.
Lear Automotive: reliable tests on high-quality prototypes
Lear Automotive provides complete seat systems, electronic products and electrical distribution systems. The company's world-class products are designed, engineered and manufactured by a diverse team of 90,000 employees at 215 locations in 34 countries.
Lear’s dedication to continuously improve their processes and vehicle interior quality stimulates them to turn to high quality prototypes for performing reliable tests in the early design phase. Engineers examine everything, from small components to complete vehicle systems, in terms of safety and durability.
Metal Plating prototypes: a fast and cost-effective alternative for trimming feasibility analysis
As a well-established full seat integrator, Lear has the responsibility to meet governmental and customer safety specifications. Therefore, their seating components are fully examined for physical durability, life-cycle integrity, noise, vibration and strength – even from the prototyping phase.
When projects are in RFQ phase, Lear has to perform trimming trials. At this stage it is very difficult to materialise metal prototype frames that are fully representative. Convinced that there must be a better solution out there, Lear recently contacted Materialise to provide them with car seat frames that are representative and less expensive than the ones they used before.
After evaluating Lear’s requirements, we realised that we had the perfect solution for them, i.e. our new metal plating technology combined with Mammoth stereolithography. Dispositing a layer of copper and then a layer of nickel onto a stereolithography prototype makes this component unique in its performance. Materialise’s Mammoth stereolithography technique provides the unique benefit of being able to produce a component in any requested shape without manual effort and with dimensions of up to 2100 mm x 700 mm x 800 mm. Adding a composite metal lamination of copper and nickel to the stereolithography parts, provides a stiff and strong surface with improved stability.
Lear Automotive were delighted with their metal plated prototypes as they much more closely resembled the final serial frame design on a technical level and allowed them to run more accurate trimming feasibility analysis.
Until we discovered the metal plating service of Materialise, we used to do with manual metal sheet bending. Today we have the luxury to make use of large parts in metal plated stereolithography that are delivered in record times and are in accordance with our CAD definitions. Finally, we are able to put realistic tension onto fabrics and foam of the car seats during our trimming feasibility.
Metal Plating process
The procedure starts with a component that is built using additive layer manufacturing techniques, like stereolithography, laser sintering or fused deposition modelling. This component then undergoes the metal plating process during which a layer of copper and optionally nickel is applied.
Typically, the Cu and Ni layer have a thickness of 0.05 mm each, but we can vary the layer thickness, up to 0.2 mm. This results in components with increased strength, temperature resistance, abrasion resistance and stability over time.
