[Author’s Note, 11/29/22: The comments made by readers at the bottom of this post regarding their unfulfilled orders have been forwarded to AREVO. AREVO has yet to respond.]
As the world’s first 3D-printed unibody carbon fiber composite bike, the Superstrata is an important pointer of the commercialization of the concept of mass customization. As Sonny Vu, the founder of AREVO points out in the above interview, the Superstrata is fully customizable in over 500,000 total combinations.
The most important customization is the 3D-printed frame. It is printed to match a customer’s specific needs around things like height, weight, and inseam. Their 3D printing technique uses thermoplastic carbon fiber composites. This material combined with a continuous unibody frame means up to 61 times the strength-to-weight ratio of steel according to their crowd-sourced website (they quickly sold out their first batch of these bicycles).
The bottom line is that this bicycle is much lighter than a traditional steel frame, doesn’t suffer from rust, and is recyclable. Unlike other carbon printed frames, their continuous printing technique eliminates gluing or bolting different pieces together, reducing failure points.
3D Printing – Faster Development, Less Waste, & Distributed Manufacturing #
The Superstrata is a demonstration of what AREVO’s technology can do. AREVO’s products go beyond the printer and embrace the entire process from design to manufacture. Their software allows the creation of a “digital twin” of a part, such that a part can be virtually printed and tested before printing a real part.
One of the advantages of this is the elimination of traditional tooling/mold costs. Additionally, there is a time-to-market as beta units can be created and tested much faster in a virtual world compared to traditional design and development processes.
These reduced development times and costs make the creation of one-off parts practical (e.g. a bike frame printed to fit a given user). The 3D printer can be used to print multiple items by simply feeding it different files, as compared to traditional parts where different and expensive tooling would be required for each part.
AREVO’s 3D printing also points to the idea that manufacturing can be closer to the customer in that the basic raw material is carbon fiber reinforced thermoplastics. Printing allows designs that reduce the number of discrete components necessary to create a product (e.g. the unibody frame).
This distributed manufacturing approach means that components are printed locally, instead of shipping from centralized factories. This could make for more efficient supply chains (e.g. not having to hold inventory, printing on-demand instead of waiting for trucks to bring special parts).
Interview Highlights: #
- 00:17 – CES2022 was a great stage to see the Superstrata up close and Sonny Vu provides an overview of how they came up with this innovative bike.
- 02:12 – Vu talks about the advantages of additive manufacturing.
- 03:02 – AREVO’s core business is making complex, large composition parts quickly and at scale.
- 04:30 – Some of the other components AREVO produces are for the aerospace industry, drones, and electric scooters. They even have a chair in their product portolio. Printing allows designs that wouldn’t be possible with traditional tooling.
- 05:55 – Another advantage of additive manufacturing is that there is much less waste than traditional matching approaches.
- 06:31 – The discussion ends on the topic of distributed manufacturing.
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