Magnesium Thixomolded Wheels

Recently Haitian, Chongqing University, alongside several partners put into production one of the world's largest Thixomolding machines, the HMG3600, to mass produce automotive wheels.

Typically, magnesium alloy wheels are made using forging. However, this project employed thixomolding to create 16-inch wheels for ordinary passenger cars. Each wheel weighs 7 kg (10 kg shot weight) offering a 30% weight reduction over aluminum alloy wheels, lowering weight and improving vehicle efficiency.

Thixomolding also achieves lower costs compared to traditional die casted and forged magnesium wheels while providing higher quality and better properties compared to conventional HPDC processes.

Youtuber “The Limiting Factor” made an educational video about magnesium thixomolding and covered the topic of wheels, watch the video here

Additionally, in November the new 3,600t machine produced Cross Car Beams (CCB) with an injection weight of 6.1 kg and length of more than 1.4 meters. The final product weighs 3.8 kg which compared to the traditional steel product weighs 50% less, according to Baowu Magnesium.

BYD Installed a 9,000t Giga Press

Chinese media from Shenzhen reported that “BYD has installed new 5,000t and 9,000t die casting equipment at their new industrial park in Shenzhen”. It’s reported that the equipment is being used for R&D and to produce battery trays.

The supplier chosen by BYD is LK Machinery according to the report. LK Machinery supplies Giga Presses to Tesla Giga Shanghai and LK Group is the owner of IDRA which supplies the 9,000t machines to Tesla Gigafactory Texas.

Previously insiders reported that BYD has invested in the construction of an "integrated body" die casting project, aka Gigacasting, for the future platform of its vehicles. The initial investment will consist in 390.5 million Yuan ($54 million) for the construction of a Gigacasting shop and the purchase of one 9,000 t Giga Press and its related supporting equipment.

Additional info revealed the plan is to adopt heat treatment free Al alloys and utilize both Front and Rear Underbody Gigacastings.

Carbon Neutral Magnesium Production is Possible

Magrathea, a company developing innovative technology for the production of carbon neutral light metal from seawater, has shown quantitatively that its future product can be inherently carbon neutral using ISO-compliant prospective life cycle assessment (LCA).

To show that Magrathea’s process will be able to produce metal with net zero cradle-to-gate embodied CO2 emissions, the company partnered with Minviro, a globally recognized expert in metals and chemical production LCA. Minviro independently built an ISO 14040-14044/ISO-14067-compliant prospective LCA for an example set of engineering process data from Magrathea’s modeling work representing a future project configuration. The LCA showed that Magrathea’s process can be configured to produce metal with embodied CO2 emissions of around 0 kg CO2 eq./kg magnesium.

“Inherently carbon neutral primary structural metal was previously considered impossible” said Alex Grant, CEO of Magrathea. “Customers representing a quarter of the entire world’s non-China magnesium market have signed LOIs and MOUs with us because they see how this future will improve their products and the world.” A summary of the results of the LCA as compared to alternative primary production processes for magnesium is shown below.

This CO2 footprint is enabled by technology specifically designed to integrate clean, renewable intermittent energy and a carbon-sequestering magnesium oxide co-product.

Nio Introduced a New Gigacasting Aluminum Alloy

Nio recently announced that its self-developed “NIO 2” heat treatment free aluminum alloy has completed comprehensive verification and has been applied to the new Nio ET9 rear underbody (RUB) Gigacasting and the two RUB Megacastings forming the Onvo L60 underbody.

From my understanding, the new alloy will be open to the entire automotive industry. It will challenge the wide use in the Chinese Megacasting market of the C611 EZCast Al alloy developed by Alcoa.

Nio has been supported by several partners such as the Chinese Gigacasting supplier Wencan.