The Permundus Challenge is the biggest Additive Manufacturing show on the planet and Byron competed against professional and commercial entities for the award - very few of the 38 finalists were students or hobbyists.
The competition formed part of the 2019 FormNext Conference in Frankfurt, Germany.
Byron is part of the Advanced Engineering Design Group in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Mandela University which specialises in Design for Lightweighting and Additive Manufacturing collaborative projects. His design has already met with much favourable comment globally and was printed by EOS for display at FormNext.
The mountain bike frame 3D-printed seamlessly in two parts consisting of the swing-arm and the main frame. This frame is designed to be printed on the Aeroswift SLM machine in South Africa in Ti-6Al-4V utilizing their extremely large bed size (2mx0.6mx0.7m).
Due to the extremely high cost of top of the range mountain biking components, this design could possibly compete with the high-end carbon fiber designs economically. Furthermore tools such as Topology Optimization as used in this project increase it's weight/stiffness competitiveness as 3D-Printers are not limited to single/split draw mold constraints like carbon bikes are.
This will be the first time a SLM bicycle has been printed without welding sections together and will be one of the largest metal 3D-Printed objects ever.
