AREVO’S FRAMEWORK

AREVO'S FRAMEWORK WORDS: SAM DAVIES

In a research and development lab Both bikes are to be manufactured onin lightweighting the products as it is adding in Milpitas, California, a composite demand in their thousands – the money durability. electric moped circles the room it was raised via Indiegogo would equate to more thought up in, printed in, painted in, than 3,000 e-bikes or 4,000 standard In addition to the material’s properties, finished and fully assembled in, while a chair bikes at early bird prices – and be shipped the unibody frame being manufactured in with a similar upbringing sits one of Arevo’s from December through to 2021. Each a single piece means there are no welding many engineers on the workshop’s outskirts. unibody bike frame is to be customised seams or bolts, while generative design per the height, weight, shirt and trouser software allows Arevo to produce a mesh

The moped, which went from concept measurements of the user and produced of carbon fibre, implementing strength in all to working vehicle in under four and a at a rate of two per machine per day with three dimensions, and optimise where the half weeks, and the chair, created in even Arevo’s composite 3D printing equipment. fibres are laid to apply strength properties less time, were produced with the additive only where it is needed. Not wanting to be manufacturing firm’s continuous carbon fibre profligate with its resources, Arevo has also 3D printing technology, but may never see the light of day. One is merely the exploits of the freedom within Arevo to be inventive and imaginative and drew a disbelieving laugh from recently-appointed CEO Sonny Vu, “This is going to transform manufacturing.” moved away from using PEEK because, as Vu puts it, “you don’t need heat resistance for your bike – by the time it melts you were dead 300 degrees ago.” What has been deemed necessary, though, is the utmost care and precision. while the other was a serious endeavour, Within 500,000 variations, the bike frame before the company turned its attention to a is to be customised to the user’s clothing more immediately attainable product. Arevo Arevo’s patented approach sees a measurements, while also factoring in riding believes itself to be an entrepreneurial six-axis robot deposit a carbon fibrestyle and wheel choice, and each product is company that experiments with liberty, ‘takes reinforced thermoplastic filament which to be hand finished and put through a Finite chances’ and is full of people who ‘forego has been heated through a laser source Element Analysis process before shipping. a comfortable life for one of exploration.’ It and compressed into substrate layers. This lives by the notion that, like a blind squirrel process is said to eliminate voids inside and That delivery phase will commence at the looking for nuts, amongst the many bad between layers at any angle or direction. end of 2020 – three years after an initial ideas it has, a good one will eventually be The decision to use thermoplastic material concept was developed, two years after stumbled upon. instead of thermoset material, like most other Arevo started working on an electric version composite bike frame manufacturers, has and a year after prototypes of both had

A prime example of these efforts is the been inspired by the aerospace industry’s been completed and iterated. The speed at composite Superstrata e-bike and bicycle switch to take advantage of the superior which the pre-orders of the Superstrata bikes models, which generated more than 3 impact resistance, with Arevo less interested came flooding in spoke to the popularity million USD worth of pre-orders in the first of the products, and proved to Vu and his two weeks and over 6 colleagues that their trust in 3D printing million USD by midand a freedom to innovate has been wellSeptember. placed.

“Ninety-nine per cent of all ideas, including the ones we come up with, are bad. You only need one good one but imagine if you had to set up 100 different manufacturing lines just to find out. That’s the beauty of additive manufacturing,” Vu told TCT. “This is why I joined this company. I just thought this is going to completely transform manufacturing.”