Electric Motorcycle Is 3D Printed ... with Metal

摘要

It's probably too late to buy one, but some lucky people will soon be the owners of only 50 electric motorcycles made entirely with 3D printing from a super-lightweight aluminum alloy. The Light Rider was made by engineers at Germany's APWorks. Their day jobs are designing and building bionically optimized metal parts using additive manufacturing for all kinds of aerospace, automotive, and robotics products. The motorcycle's frame looks more like an exo-skeleton than a traditional machine, with organic shapes that are characteristic of what happens when you combine the geometrical design freedom of 3D printing with optimization software. The engineers at this wholly owned subsidiary of Airbus in fact used bionic algorithms to define the frame's structure with Altair's OptiStruct. This guaranteed the optimal use of material and provided the frame's structure with high stiffness.