JEC COMPOSITES MAGAZINE - Issue #116 - October 2017 - 54

SOLUTlONS motorbike

lnnovative SLS front air inlet made
with high-performance materials

emanuele Grotti,
Assistant Production Manager
CRP Technology

C

RP Technology's R&D
department tackled the
development of a new front
air inlet for a Moto3 racing customer to solve space issues in
the front fork area. The part was
manufactured with Windform®
materials using a selective laser
sintering (SLS) additive manufacturing technique.
Testing showed that increasing
the airflow to the airbox improved the engine performance
at every RPM range. Hence,
the team and the engineers
concluded that they needed to

As race car wiring is becoming more and more complex, power units are
made up of several parts that need to be integrated into the final assembly.
The available space being increasingly limited, engineers frequently use
flexible parts such as cooling ducts and wiring harnesses. The motorbike
solution outlined in this paper can be easily applied to the automotive
racing world.

design a new track-ready inlet,
making the air inlet longer and
bringing the opening up to the
front side of the fairing in order
to have a direct airflow with less
turbulence.
Among the goals to be achieved
was the need to avoid modifying
the existing frame and triple
clamps. The design would have
to fit to the existing platform in
order to test the on-track advantages and disadvantages of this
solution, and to make a direct
comparison with the current
standard inlet.
Additive manufacturing (SLS)
and Windform® materials
allowed for:

CRP Racing,
125cc (archive
photo). Outlined in
red, the front air
inlet similar to the
Windform® inlet

54

jec composites magazine / N°116 October 2017

- Total freedom without design
limitations (design for functionality instead of design for
manufacturing)
- Creation of a mock-up for
assembling, fitting, and functionality
- Production of parts for performance tests
- Faster product and project
completion
The final decision to use the
new inlet came from its on-track
behaviour, the key points being
its performance and reliability.
The engineers kept the current
airbox with the aim to mount
both the traditional air inlet and
the new one and to acquire ontrack airbox pressure data.
The original airbox was scanned
and virtually assembled with
the CAD system using reverse
engineering. This enabled the
engineers to create a new air inlet
model taking into account the
amount of available space and
the assembly constraints of the
current airbox and frame.

CAD files of the front air inlet

First prototype
Once the first draft of the air inlet was developed, a Windform
GF 2.0 prototype was created.
The decision to use this material was made to reduce costs,
while being able to perform
multiple tests with multiple
prototypes. Windform GF 2.0
is a composite polyamide-based
material reinforced with glass
and aluminium that shows a
significantly improved heat
distortion temperature (HDT)
(almost +8%), as well higher
tensile strength and elongation
strength, offering greater ductility than the previous version. The
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of JEC COMPOSITES MAGAZINE - Issue #116 - October 2017
