Tesla's secret weapon: the Giga Press!

a few days ago idra released a fairly standard sounding corporate video about their products but within the half hour video are some real gems that can help us understand just how impressive their gigapress is and why it's helped to propel tesla to the forefront of auto manufacturing and what new tricks idra has up its sleeve for the future hey y'all it's dr know it all so as you might expect i will put the link to the full half hour video in the description it is a quasi-interactive webinar format so it doesn't have a huge amount of bells and whistles although it does have a lot of very dramatic music and b-roll and so forth and so on and by the way when you watch the clips that i show you the b-roll stuff which is the shots of the actual giga press and the factory and everything that's all from idra and that's part of their video i'm not putting that over the top so it's kind of funky because a lot of times they have these weird sound effects going on underneath people just talking about you know the amount of weight or something like that that the gigapress is the idea for this video by the way came about because i had at least six different people from all over the place ask me about this particular video so i figure there's got to be some interest in it and i hope other people feel the same way anyway i'm going to play several short clips that i've picked out and then i'm going to react to those clips and hopefully help to elucidate some of the more complex or interesting details that they talk about in their video can you explain to us how it is we arrived at the giga press well let me start from three years ago three years ago we reached the 100 million euro turnover we believed that another step forward had to be made when in 2017 in fact we deeply analyzed our product technology and found the potential for good improvements it was the time to challenge ourselves again also because the aluminum casting product development trend showed another step towards more sophisticated application of aluminum it was the full electric car which was strongly pushing for that we were let's say visioners at the time we got to the conclusion that the industry will need three things one giga prices for super large amalgamated customers but also best-in-class automated production cell with high process stability and efficiency and sustainable and deco driven in other words we would need a new a new product line so as you can hear from that clip there's a lot of history involved in this starting somewhere around 2017 and it sounds somewhat like uh idra and by the way i'm pronouncing this as europeans would say not hydra which would be the u.s way of saying it so anyway uh but idra thought about the fact that they were i guess he's talking about being a visionary and thinking about the future and the fact that larger presses were going to be needed than were currently available and obviously tesla uses these presses now in fact according to this and we're going to see this in in later clips the first two gigapresses ever manufactured are actually at tesla right now they're in the hands of a customer right so anyway um but but those the smaller presses were not going to be adequate for the needs specifically of battery electric vehicle manufacturers so that's where the kind of inspiration for this came from it's unclear whether they had been in talks with tesla originally or whether they kind of developed this press and then went to tesla and say hey we're developing this thing would you guys like this right so that part is unclear but but very definitely there was a connection between the bev category the growing demand for battery electric vehicles and the need for one of these larger single piece casting machines you are going to see giga press number three in our shop floor running full in automatic cycle for your information two giga presses have been already shipped and installed at our customer plans running production batches of the largest casting part ever made worldwide and now we have an additional 9 giga prizes to be delivered during 2021 and we hope that more orders might come soon so as you just heard there literally idra has built two giga presses so far well three gigapresses two of them have been shipped to a customer and there just so happens to be a gigapress in shanghai and a gigapress in fremont so we can pretty much guess where those two gigapresses are right now and they have nine more so i assume gigapress three and i know that tesla has an order for oh my gosh i mean a couple in berlin a couple in fremont a couple in shanghai a couple in texas so there's a really good chance that every single giga press that has been made and that is going to be made in the next year are all slated for tesla which makes it really difficult for the competition to catch up at all even if they had the foresight and the division and the desire to do these single piece castings i don't know where they're going to get a giga press because it's not like you can just turn to a catalog and make these there literally have been two of these that have ever been constructed a day the 20th of august this is the day that i will never forget the day in which the first batch of good parts have been made eliminating any skepticism in the mind of the international aluminum foundry community we decided to have gigapress in our product portfolio three years ago when nobody thought that it was necessary to have such monster diecasting machine at the time the largest already designed structural part could be produced using a 4 000 ton but our thinking was that sooner or later you would have needed a 6 000 ton so as you just heard the original castings the ones that were the first successful castings were only august 20th of i assume 2020 which means that we're talking about something that's only happened about six months ish ago from when i'm recording this and and that means that not only edra but also tesla was taking a massive chance in terms of the way that they were you know gambling on having a machine like this be able to produce something that would actually be effective and create the parts that they're looking for immediately after this they talk about how a 6 000 ton machine in other words the size of this thing in the pr i assume that's the pressure of the die casting or maybe it's the size of the die casting but anyway that a 6 000 ton machine allows for a very different way of thinking about constructing a large part giga presses can dramatically change the way the underbody structure of cars and trucks can be made this new machine offers revolutionary advantages the lower underbody of the car can now be made in three only modules one front casting the battery case in the middle and one back casting let's talk about the investment reduction in foundry shop if you do not have a giga press and utilize the four thousand tonne model you need four digestive machines each one dedicated to the production of front right and front left back right and back left instead you can run the same volume by using two giga presses and of course the cost of two giga presses is lower than the cost of four four thousand digesting machine not only that imagine also the finishing and the assembly line the implication of having only very few parts the total investments for the assembling line can also be dramatically reduced less assembly stations less fixers but also less robots less quality checks well i can even imagine that the length of the entire line can be reduced by a good 20 percent so this little tidbit is fascinating basically what he's talking about is reducing the car to a front casting a center casting and a back casting and if you think about this what did tesla do on battery day they talked about a structural battery compartment which means that they're looking at now creating a compartment where you can put the batteries inside of an aluminum you know chassis or whatever a tray that you're putting it in basically and putting that epoxy in the battery compartment and creating a rigid structural component out of that so this giga press actually becomes a part of that particular aspect of building the car so basically you can build the underbody of the car not the outside part the pretty part or whatever but the three part the parts underneath can be reduced from hundreds of parts down to three parts and that is absolutely amazing and of course there's the reduction in the cost that's associated with it i don't know how much all of these things cost since they're such one-off things you probably have to ask in order to find out how much they cost but clearly he says that that the four die casting machines that you need to build the four front and back parts are more expensive than purchasing two giga presses as opposed to the four four thousand ton machines so anyway you've got a massive cost savings you've got a savings in terms of the the components are going to come out the same every single time and you've got a savings by having to purchase fewer actual moving parts basically fewer casting machines as a foundry man i like to say that by pouring one single piece you get very accurate and repeatable geometry and better mechanical properties such as more stiffness than the multi-part solutions the total energy consumption of the full underbody manufacturing process can be estimated in a good 20 percent less than the traditional one which means less co2 in the air so as as you can hear the advantage of building one part is that you get more consistency you get more stiffness and you get more or better quality control because everything comes out the same every single time and by the way sandy monroe has been beating this drum for a while so it's interesting to see that you know he is very much aligned with what idra is doing and in addition according to idre at least it uses 54 percent of the energy of earlier smaller presses so it's actually energy efficient and therefore co2 and carbon emissions efficient as well which is a big advantage of course this is also you know trusting what they're having to say and i'm sure other competing platforms would have something to say but anyway at least that's what idris says is that they save quite a bit of carbon and energy you know being produced and in terms of utilizing their machines so then we get to actually looking at the gigapress itself which is an amazing and absolutely gigantic beast of a machine before we get to that however i think what you should know about is kind of what die casting is if you've ever owned a hot wheels car or like a matchbox car or something those were like i remember that as a kid i would look on the bottom and it would say die cast and i was like ooh cool it's basically you take a dye which is a mold right so you're taking some sort of shape which is a hollow cavity in something and then you're filling it with some sort of liquid which would be molten metal in this case and then you're pressing it and cooling it down rapidly to create the actual form so there's a lot that's going on here number one you have to have a gigantic press and we'll see the size of this thing in just a second you have to have this huge press that you can do and then you have to have very very careful control of the metallurgy it doesn't matter so much for like hot wheels cars right because they're tiny and it doesn't really matter if they're structurally or they're structurally the best or or in weight in terms of weight they're the lightest things in the world but when you get to the aluminum in a car you want to save every single gram of weight and you want it to be super stiff and you want it to be incredibly repeatable and when you have something that big the pouring of the material into the press and the actual activity of the press has to happen really really quickly because if it doesn't happen that fast what will happen is you'll end up with like pockets like maybe if it doesn't pour in correctly you'll have like a pocket where no aluminum ended up or a thinner amount of aluminum or a larger amount or something like that so you have to be able to pour it in in a non-turbulent fashion and then you have to be able to press it very rapidly and remove the heat very very rapidly from the whole thing and then of course you have to cycle again because right it has to it can't go like that and then take a half an hour to recharge because then every part takes a half an hour you're looking at seconds per part right it's like right it's got to be able to do it that quickly so all of this is incredibly complicated technology when you think about something that's multiple meters on a side in terms of size the dimension is impressive isn't it it's 19.7 meter long 7.4 meter wide and six meter high it is like a house that weighs 430 tons the cycle time is remarkably shorter than a 4 000 ton anyway so obviously as you just heard from fiorenzo this is a gigantic machine and it operates at a very high speed too he calls it a sprintery says it's agile like a sprinter uh you can tell he's very proud he's the head i believe the person who engineered this um you know at least thought of it himself for the most part and he said he calls it his baby so he's obviously very proud of this gigantic house size machine and it really is more or less the dimensions of a house i mean kind of a long skinny house but but anyway it's it's incredible and it weighs many many tons i was going to say a ton but that's way underselling it so anyway it's big it can cast a huge thing at once and it's very very fast and at the heart of it is the 5s which is the press thing itself the 5s is the state of the art at the heart of die casting process one of the most important let's say performance it is the increasing dynamic force in order to ensuring to fill also the big dice the new dyes arrive also two meters wide or two meters square okay and the injection uh must be uh we must be sure in order to fill with constant high flow velocity on the molten metal and this is fundamental to have from the smooth movement of the injection from the very beginning to the end of the stroke it means that you avoid totally what is related to the turbulence inside the tank this allowing us to reduce the time to recharge the accumulator we have to highlight that with this system we have the same efficiency then and the same performance than a standard machine okay but with smaller motor and reduce the kilowatt so obviously that was a lot of very technical talking but basically he's reiterating what i was talking about with die casting is which is you've got this huge challenge of a two meter square die that you have to fill laminarly which means smoothly you can't have turbulent flow of this molten metal and then it's got to push this under high pressure into the shape that it needs to become to become whatever that you know shape of the back of the car or something like that is and it's got to be able to do it fast and then it's got to be able to recharge that quickly so that's the heart of the whole thing basically is that they are able to do on a massive scale what is relatively simple to do again you know with like a hot wheels car those have been around since the 1970s and those have been die cast for a long time but those dies are like this big right they're just a couple of centimeters on the side so we're massively expanding the size of this thing which is it makes it orders of magnitude more difficult to create laminar flow and get the correct amount of aluminum and by the way tesla has developed its own chemistry so that they've got an aluminum that flows properly under these conditions as well so it's not just idra that's doing this it's also tesla that's working on the chemistry that's involved in pouring the correct kind of aluminum alloy into this press so that it can all work very very rapidly and consistently yes this is the moving plate and is a casted in one piece of course okay it is more than 3.6 meter squared okay and the weight is around 64 tons and then as you can see we turn to the actual platen which is the thing that's the actual dye press it's it's over three and a half meters on a side 64 tons and forged out of one piece that is incredible so the amount of pressure that that can put onto the die as it's casting the casting and creating each of these pieces is i guess six tons since it's a or six thousand tons excuse me since that's the type of machine it is but that's incredible that it can put that much pressure on it can be that consistent over that large of a range and by the way a 6 000 ton machine is incredible but i have heard that the cyber truck might well need an 8 000 ton machine or i don't know because they're using a different methodology they may just decide to use uh sheets of stainless steel and bend them as opposed to doing die casting but we'll have to see because the the underbody of the truck i mean they've got an exoskeleton but they're still going to be some sort of underbody so anyway we'll have to see what kind of manufacturing techniques the cyber truck needs but it might just need something that's able to bend this steel into shape but still underneath the battery tray the structural battery tray that they're going to have to put the batteries in i would imagine they're going to have to cast that with some sort of a machine like the gigapress so anyway they might need a bigger gigapress like an 8 000 ton machine as opposed to a 6000 ton machine so we'll have to see how that goes in the future in a moment let's take a look at idra's newest invention the lpf but first if you enjoyed this video please do like and subscribe it so other people can find it and of course so you can stay informed on other videos also a huge shout out and thank you to my patrons on patreon you all are wonderful thank you so much for your support i really do appreciate it we actually have one new patron since last time one tree tree seven so great name and thank you for joining us of course don't forget about our merge store which has don't mess with tesla all input is error and a bunch of other merch that you can look at and if you purchase something it helps support the channel thank you and finally don't forget we are both tesla and amazon affiliates if you look in the description you can see how clicking on a link and going shopping helps out the channel and now let's take a look at lpf or low pressure forging which is a new thing that idra is coming out with it sounds utterly fascinating so what they're talking about here is a 2 000 ton press which is only one third the size of the 6 000 ton die casting machine that they have the giga press but it works in a very different way and that's super cool the low pressure forging system is utilizing the best of low pressure and of high pressure technology and bringing them together to create a part that is forged and giving us a semi-solid casting technology so basically what john is talking about here is that they're kind of blending die casting which is high pressure and low pressure systems with forging and forging by the way is that system of like heating up a metal and then cooling it down and heating it up and cooling it down so that's what forging is and he's basically saying that they're taking the best of both worlds with this low pressure forging system and that's super super interesting strive to differentiate your product to your production by utilizing a new foundry process our patented lpf a low pressure forging process this technology combines the best of high pressure die casting which is the short cycle time with low pressure laminar flow feeding of the dye with the aluminum forging process pressurizing the dye cavity when the metal is still semi-solid this will allow the foundry to make parts with mechanical and metallurgical properties close to that's achievable with the forging process but with lower production so as you can hear the idea here is to have something that's more metallurgically interesting in other words the forging process and this is what you use for like steel if you have really really nice kitchen knives or a samurai sword or a very nice sword they're forged and the forging process creates metal with better properties it makes them stronger it makes them somewhat more flexible it just improves the properties of them and so the idea here is to create a product that allows you to laminarly put in some sort of metal into it sounds like aluminum is what they're primarily targeting for but you put that into a low pressure system and then you forge it using a furnace that's underneath this whole system to actually bake the metal etc to cause it to get to the correct metallurgical quality and then the other advantage of this of course is that forging is a very very slow process and it sounds like what they've done is they've created something that works very very rapidly instead this is a 2000 ton press now this new machine the lpf is actually standing for low pressure forging fiori do you want to explain to us what low pressure forging means well the machine is similar than a low pressure because you can see a vertical closing okay and the vein where is installed a furnace underneath the fixed plate but the big difference are the cycle time and the pressure on the alloy which is similar to an high pressure die casting when the vertical hydraulic press has closed the die the liquid metal is smoothly moved into the mold cavity at the pressure between 0.5 and 1 bar with no turbulence then we mechanically plug the feeder tube with a hydraulic plunger so that we can immediately depressurize the furnace so finally we can apply very high pressure that can reach up to 1200 bar when the alloy is inside the cavity is still semi-solid a sort of forging so in this way the final solidification takes place with high pressure minimizing metal porosity and at the same time increasing heat transfer with dye so in this way shortening cycle time to similar standards is normally found as you know in high pressure by casting so again we have an awful lot of detail here but the basic idea is where the two men were standing there's a furnace underneath there which will heat this entire thing up and basically you pour a metal in and then it sounds like what they're doing is evacuating it very rapidly to reduce the temperature so they're gonna they're gonna reduce the pressure which will cool off this metal which will turn it into a semi-solid kind of slush like a taffy or something except a metal taffy you definitely wouldn't want to touch that with your hands but anyway it will do that and then it will rapidly increase the pressure and and while it's got the furnace running which will cause the metal to again change this is all incredibly weird complex chemistry very very cool stuff but basically it will change the quality of the metal to be like that of forged metal but as opposed to taking hours or days to make a forged product it sounds like it will just take seconds so basically the idea is that you'll have the speed of high pressure die casting with the quality of low pressure forging systems will tesla end up using lpf that's unclear they talk specifically about high performance wheels and stuff so casting those wheels as a single unit so it is quite possible that tesla might use it for some of its parts it doesn't sound like this would be a replacement for any kind of large underbody casting or anything but it might be really cool for particular elements like wheels or something or axles or things like that so as is obvious idra's incredible and incredibly huge technology is central to what tesla is able to do and it allows them to literally cast their cars in just a few pieces like a hot wheels toy the cost time parts and energy savings are enormous and no one is going to be able to catch tesla without creating parts like this but it seems like tesla might have all the 2021 orders already wrapped up so good luck to everybody else as for the lpf we will have to see whether or not tesla wants this tech too but it's pretty amazing stuff as well idra is in other words a low-key savage italian company who's helping to change our world thanks idra all right i hope you found this very technical episode informative and fun and thought provoking if you did definitely remember to like and subscribe and in the meantime please do ask me questions in the comments or at my email address which is drno at all knows gmail.com until next time bye-bye

Channel: Dr. Know-it-all Knows it all

Views: 153,210

Keywords: dr know it all, dr know-it-all, deep neural networks, Artificial intelligence, autonomous, self driving, tesla, elon musk, ai, tesla news, battery, disruption, stock, tsla, tesla stock, lidar, charge, tesla supercharger, plug, tesla insurance, rumor, energy, electricity, ice, vw, ford, legacy, auto, ice car, electric cars, future, tony seba, idra, giga, giga press, lpf, low pressure forging, die, die cast, die casting, unibody, single piece casting, tesla model y, model y, model 3, tesla model 3

Id: 8rWCTasV2t0

Length: 25min 41sec (1541 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 07 2021