Renishaw’s steel additive manufacturing expertise helped Workforce GB to win eight medals throughout a collection of observe biking competitions on the 2024 Paris Olympics.
Amongst these eight medals was a world-record breaking gold medal for Workforce GB within the ladies’s group dash.
Additive manufacturing expertise was used to provide a number of elements of Workforce BG’s observe bike, together with an aerodynamic crank, dropouts, seat keep bridge and seat submit. The seat submit featured a hole centre and backwards leaning design, permitting airflow by way of the centre of the bike, whereas the crank was designed with a variable lattice construction that was denser the place it was prone to endure extra stress much less dense the place it may afford to be lighter. All in, Renishaw additively manufactured greater than 1,000 elements to help 32 observe bikes plus spares.
Renishaw collaborated with British Biking for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, with the UK’s nationwide governing physique for biking wishing to construct on that success for this 12 months’s Video games. The shorter turnaround time between the Tokyo Video games (which happened in 2021 because of the Covid-19 pandemic) and Paris Video games meant Workforce GB confronted vital time constraints for this Summer season’s Olympics.
“The carbon fibre elements produced utilizing conventional machining strategies for the Tokyo bike met all the necessities we had, however time constraints for the Paris bike meant that this methodology was now not viable for some bespoke elements,” mentioned Dr Oliver Caddy, Lead Venture Engineer at British Biking. “After seeing the advantages of AM and what it helped us obtain on the Tokyo bike, we knew it might be a producing methodology to discover additional.”
Ben Collins, Lead Additive Manufacturing Purposes Engineer at Renishaw, added: “After figuring out that the British Biking group couldn’t produce core crank and seat posts elements in carbon fibre inside the shorter time-frame required, we started creating some additively manufactured prototypes in plastic.
“Additive manufacturing enabled us to create complicated geometries that eliminated any pointless weight whereas delivering the energy required for the athletes to succeed in racing pace. To develop a extra aerodynamic seat submit, engineers designed extra free-form geometries to hole out the half as a lot as attainable, one thing that may not be achievable utilizing conventional strategies.”
“We’re delighted for British Biking on one other profitable Olympic Video games and to have the ability to play an element on this. It’s a implausible achievement and a fantastic showcase of the advantages of additive manufacturing.”
