Rapid manufacturing of an automotive brake pedal

Current automotive manufacturing technologies faced several limitation or constraints such as weight, product design, high manufacturing cost and lengthy supply chain. This thesis discuss the uses of additive manufacturing technologies into the automotive manufacturing. Several keys of an automotive manufacturing element, such as product design, material selection, process criteria and quality, related to the additive manufacturing technologies, are discussed in this research. As a result, a newly designed automotive brake pedal has been developed, fabricated and tested. The pedal has been benchmarked with its conventional design, resulting in a comparable quality with 55% weight reduction.