Simon Baggott of Q5D Technologies explains how new techniques simplify manufacturing for the automotive and aerospace industries.
Whether you’re creating vehicles, vessels, aircraft or consumer electronics, the near-constant tension between aspirational innovation and physics or economics will be all too familiar. You’ll have progressive ideas about forms or functions you’d like your products to have, but you’ll likely be frustrated in your attempts to achieve some because there isn’t a workable way to manufacture them.
Many designers are familiar with the challenges associated with creating electrically conductive tracks across shapes with curved and complex surfaces. Let’s look at some of these issues and the drawbacks of conventional approaches in depth.
A constant compromise?
Product makers often complain that they cannot place components, such as switches or sensors, where they’d ideally like them. This is often due to constraints that limit connectivity options: a physical wire won’t fit or is too heavy, for example. Additionally, surfaces may need to be functionalized with antennas or frequency-selective components. These issues are particularly acute on complex or curved surfaces.
Some engineers will have explored traditional printed electronics, such as laser direct structuring (LDS). LDS uses nanoparticle-loaded polymers to create conductive links on curved and complex surfaces. However, the very high cost of these polymers means this technique is generally only feasible for small-scale components — think smartphone parts. Even where LDS is economically viable, you must make the entire part out of the specialized polymer, which may not be ideal for your use case.
For those looking to create conductive tracks across larger curved surfaces, the solution has generally been to shape a film containing the conductive tracks around the surface. However, anyone who’s tried this will know it’s a challenging process, with particular risks when joining conductors. It’s generally also limited to simpler shapes, laborious, and requires a highly skilled worker.
Then, you add in broader challenges. The high cost of the tooling required for traditional manufacturing techniques means flexibility is a luxury most cannot afford. Once you commit to a design, making changes is expensive, and the ability to produce multiple product variants is limited. Moreover, convoluted, multi-step logistics and production processes are typically required to build and assemble discrete parts into the final product. In addition to higher costs, all of this handling increases the risk of damage to components during production.
Put together, these issues will likely impact your products in various ways. Because of manufacturing limitations, you may struggle to create the form or function you want. You’ll lack the freedom to alter designs or create lots of product variants once you’ve tooled up. You could be experiencing high rates of damage and failure during manufacturing or simply be paying high costs due to complex logistics and handling. Where technology needs to be adaptable to competitive and perhaps hostile environments, these traditional manufacturing methods can be dangerously slow to respond.
A new way to create conductive tracks on complex and curved surfaces
Research engineers at Q5D have been developing a new set of manufacturing techniques to address these and other challenges. The techniques use a high-accuracy gantry robot to form conductive tracks as narrow as 100 microns onto large, complex, or conformal surfaces that typically form part of larger electrical devices. Crucially, the approaches can be applied to virtually any type and shape of substrate. This includes large objects, such as antennas or frequency-selective shielding in aircraft nosecones.
The techniques use materials such as copper and silver to give surfaces electrical function. This means you can connect devices via tracks or add features such as antennas or capacitive touch to your surfaces. Depending on which technique you use, metal tracks that support high currents can achieve base metal conductivity of up to 100%.
In parallel, the team behind the techniques aims to simplify manufacturing, compared to conventional methods of creating conductive tracks on curved and complex surfaces. Where other approaches require some level of off-machine processing, including difficult manual tasks, the newly developed techniques enable on-machine metallization, meaning there are fewer overall steps and less handling.
Unlocking new design opportunities
As product designers and engineers ourselves, we’re incredibly excited about the potential of these new techniques. We foresee them enabling the engineering community to add electrical function to whole new form factors and sizes that would previously have been too complex or costly to manufacture. We also see them creating opportunities to place components or functionality in new locations or produce parts that are currently unviable.
Elsewhere, the techniques bring the freedom to use the right material for each part of the product and lay the necessary conductive track onto it. This can eliminate the need to compromise on the overall material used, or the requirement to make a whole component out of expensive polymer, which may not be fit for purpose.
We’re also excited about the manufacturing flexibility these techniques promise. Because the tooling requirement has been removed, it’s as easy to create 1,000 of the same part as it is to create 1,000 different parts or variants.
For budget holders, these new approaches will bring opportunities to reduce production and assembly costs due to less handling, logistics, and human input, as well as lower risk of damage to components during production and assembly. Automating what would traditionally have been largely manual processes is also a proven way to enhance overall product quality, meaning product failure rates once in the field should also reduce.
Pushing the boundaries of engineering
To summarize, these new techniques extend the boundaries of what design engineers can create:
- Lay down a conductive track on virtually any shape and type of surface, at scale.
- Place connectivity or electrical function in places that wouldn’t have been possible before.
- Reduce or eliminate compromises you’ve traditionally had to make in your designs.
- Or simply reduce the manufacturing complexity and cost of your product.
Let’s wrap up with some use cases where these new approaches could be effective. A great example would be mobile phone antennas, where you could simplify production compared to the conventional printed electronics techniques typically used today.
In the automotive industry, these techniques are being adopted to reduce the cost and complexity of manufacturing and installing components such as vehicle interiors. They can also unlock new functionality in dashboards, such as capacitive touch surfaces, or provide greater flexibility around the placement of switches.
Because the techniques can be applied at scale and are suitable for use on composite materials used in aerospace, they offer aircraft makers new opportunities in areas such as thermal management of wing heating and the aforementioned nosecone example.
Other large-scale engineering could also benefit from using techniques on curved surfaces inside radomes for frequency-selective shielding.
The R&D team at Q5D is exploring the broader potential of these techniques in manufacturing. To learn more or see a demonstration, contact the team at q5d.com/contact.
Simon Baggott is the chief marketing officer at Q5D Technologies. He has over 20 years of experience connecting people with products across B2B and B2C technology businesses. Simon has worked in both large multinational corporations such as BOC, GE, and JDR Cable Systems and in small to medium enterprises. He holds a BEng degree in materials engineering from the University of Swansea, Wales.
