Every year, standards organization SAE International holds a competition called Formula SAE, in which students from both undergraduate and graduate programs design, build, and race small formula-style race cars.For this year’s event, the University of Southern California’s (USC) Formula SAE team partnered with the UK’s Wayland Additive, an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) of electron-beam additive manufacturing (EBAM) hardware, to print a titanium exhaust collector.In a case study that Wayland Additive released, the Suspension Lead for the USC Racing team, Samuel McCarthy, explained why exhaust collectors are such difficult parts to manufacture — even for conventional manufacturing processes: “The exhaust collector is the part that joins each cylinder’s exhaust into one stream and it directly affects engine efficiency and performance.
…There are usually two critical design considerations: performance versus manufacturing difficulty,” McCarthy noted.“Optimal performance requires optimized angles of the tubes where the exhaust flow meets, a certain initial contact of flow.“Manufacturing the ideal exhaust collector with these preferred angles is generally not possible with traditional methods, such as welding, and there is always a trade-off between [performance and manufacturing difficulty].
By using AM, specifically Wayland’s NeuBeam process, we have been able to minimize the trade-off and get the best of both worlds.” Notably, USC Racing first approached Wayland Additive at RAPID + TCT 2024 in Los Angeles, which took place at the end of June.The collaborators then worked together remotely to design and print the final part.With the Formula SAE deadline of May 14-17, 2025, this means that USC Racing and Wayland Additive successfully designed, tested, and integrated the titanium exhaust collector in well under a year — an especially impressive feat considering it’s a component without any extensive 3D printing track record, at least in terms of publicly available information.
According to McCarthy, the success of the final part depended on the specific advantages of EBAM, especially the lower residual stresses on the part, when compared with powder bed fusion (PBF): “The heat cycles seen and high vibratory environment could fracture a [PBF] part.Also, the small hook retaining feature would have proven too difficult to descale.” In the end, the part that Wayland produced decreased the exhaust collector’s length by 50 percent, and helped USC Racing win 3rd place in the autocross event at Formula SAE.The USC car also finished an endurance challenge that the majority of teams in 2024 weren’t able to complete, which was a key goal for USC Racing.
Aside from the engineering achievements and performance milestones on display here, it is noteworthy that this project was only made possible as a result of the availability of a digitally-based manufacturing technology and AM’s accelerated iteration cycle.It is also significant that, thanks to a meeting at a trade show, an undergraduate engineering student was able to access a highly niche, relatively expensive technology.All of those little details were required to be brought into harmony in order to yield a component that the world has never seen before.
The beautiful thing about AM is that it enables makers to suspend their disbelief about what’s physically and logistically possible long enough to expand their imaginations, until imagination breaks through into reality.It allows engineers-in-training working on student projects to collaborate with small businesses halfway across the world to out-design conventional mass industry.Images courtesy of Wayland Additive Subscribe to Our Email Newsletter Stay up-to-date on all the latest news from the 3D printing industry and receive information and offers from third party vendors.
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