What is Giga Casting and What Can it Do?

AUSTIN, Texas - Sept. 5, 2022 - PRLog -- Value Engineering Versus Breakthrough Engineering

Structural engineers and product designers are constantly looking for ways to make their designs stronger while reducing weight and material costs, a process known as value engineering.

Often the success of these changes is measured in ounces of lost weight or cents on the dollar in cost savings.

But on occasion, creative engineers and designers can create breakthrough structural designs so revolutionary that they make everything that came before seem obsolete.

Here are a couple of examples to illustrate our point.

In architecture, the American construction industry was transformed by the introduction of balloon frame houses in the early 1800s, the fast, stick-built construction method that replaced earlier heavy post and beam designs. Then, in 1885, the first skyscraper appeared, Chicago's 10-story tall Home Insurance Building, which pioneered the use of a structural steel frame construction, allowing architects to design our first modern multi-story buildings. In 1951 Mies van der Rohe moved this steel structure inward – away from the exterior walls – to create better views and more usable space in his design for Chicago's Lake Shore Drive Apartments, the prototype of today's modern glass office towers.

Vehicle design has also seen a series of structural engineering breakthroughs. Throughout the 1920s and well into the 1930s, most volume car production was "body on frame" – bodies were built of stamped sheet metal nailed to wooden supports, then later mounted onto a strong metal frame containing the engine and running gear. This approach was essentially an incremental update to the longstanding construction practices dating back to the horse-driven carriage era.

But there was another way. Budd Manufacturing (https://formaspace.com/industrial-workbench/manufacturing...) Company, later famous for its streamlined railroad cars, such as the Pioneer Zephyr, sought to change things. In the early 1930s, they licensed their revolutionary all-metal unibody vehicle designs (known as a monocoque in French) to the French car maker Citroën (for use in the beloved Traction Avant) and Chrysler (for their art deco-styled Airflow sedan series). Budd's unibody design coalesced the entire vehicle structure into a super strong body shell, eliminating the need for wood panel supports and a separate frame.

While "body on frame" structures remain in use to this day (primarily for trucks and heavy SUVs), the majority of today's modern vehicles use a unibody structure, thanks to its relatively lower weight, higher strength, increased torsional rigidity, reduced vibration, and (usually) lower cost.

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