Manufacturing A Personalised Composite Material Driver’s Seat

Abstract

The paper presents the process of 3D-printing and laminating a composite material driver’s seat for Silesian Greenpower’s electric vehicle. Silesian Greenpower is a student’s interfaculty project, of which aim is to design, build and race a small electric race car. Aerodynamics and lightweight construction play a major role, so each element applied in the car is optimized and customized to fit in the vehicle. For this purpose, 3D-printing technology is often used by the team. A seat model made on the basis of the driver's anthropometric model was presented in the paper. Subsequently, after the appropriate adaptation of the obtained surfaces to interconnect them with each other, the FDM technology was applied using PET-G material. To increase the strength of the connections of the printed elements and to strengthen the design and stability of the chair, the element was laminated using carbon fibre and epoxy resin. The lamination process is presented and discussed in the article.