THE GOOD LIFE Technology
Kevin recently became executive chair- man, allowing his son to step up and run the day-to-day operations as CEO. But Czinger the younger does not appear to personify the tropes associated with the offspring of successful people whose path to a top job has been made Teflon-smooth. Born in Lon- don and raised in LA, Lukas is polite, per- sonable and humble as he walks me round Divergent’s factory campus, speaking in plain English about the complex technical work that he and his team carry out.
T
he foundation of what the Czingers have created is called the Divergent Adaptive Production System, or DAPS,
which has ‘additive manufacturing’ (AM), otherwise known as 3D printing, at its heart. This technology has been around for dec- ades, but until recently it has mostly been used for prototyping or aesthetic parts. By contrast, Divergent’s system can print criti- cal structural components on an industrial scale, using proprietary soſtware, laser printers and fine metal powders to produce parts that can stand up to the massive forces
IT’S NOT ‘SEND US
YOUR GEOMETRY AND WE’LL PRINT IT’... WE TAKE FULL DESIGN AUTHORITY
The Czinger 21C hypercar is the pride and joy of father and son Kevin and Lukas Czinger (above)
exerted in road cars and other complicated bits of kit. It’s also developed a robot assem- bly system that glues parts together to make bigger structures. Lukas walks me into a vast hall with five
huge AM machines. Through a small win- dow I see a matt, grey surface with a flicker- ing light burning a pattern into it. ‘So, we’ve got an aluminium powder in the chamber and over top we’ve got our lasers,’ Lukas ex- plains. ‘Basically, we’re building this part layer by layer. It might be 5,000 layers that we’re melting, a hundred microns at a time.’ As he talks, we see the laser momentarily
stop and an arm sweeps over to deposit a new, thin blanket of fine powder, ready to be laser-fused on to the structure beneath. When the part is complete, the excess pow- der is carefully vacuumed away, leaving be- hind a solid aluminium component. But printing is only a fraction of what Di-
vergent does. The parts are designed using its own, AI-powered soſtware that creates fully detailed, print-ready CAD files. ‘That’s a big difference with us,’ says
Lukas. ‘It’s not “send us your geometry and we’ll print it”. Our customers give us their requirements, then we take full design au- thority. They give us the load cases, the du- rability, the CFD [aerodynamic] target, and our soſtware takes those parameters and adds and subtracts material while it’s doing a full physics simulation, until it reaches what we call a ‘Pareto frontier’ – which
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