NASCAR Team Speeds Production with 3-D Imaging

As the operations staff at Richard Childress Racing will tell you, NASCAR racing begins long before the actual event. From the time the checkered flag is waved until the next race, RCR engineers are not only racing against time, but they're also competing to find the best technologies that will gain their professional drivers -- Kevin Harvick, Robby Gordon, Jeff Green, Johnny Sauter and Jay Sauter -- the next win.

"What we do Monday through Friday really determines what happens over the weekend on the track," says Lenny Batycki, vice president of operations at RCR. "We have to know far ahead how our engines are going to perform."

Performance is the RCR Research and Design Lab's business. State-of-the-art CAD/CAM software, computer-numerically controlled machines, coordinate measuring machines and 3-D photography software from Raindrop Geomagic are just some of the tools of the trade.

Inside the lab, the Chevrolet Monte Carlo race car engines are built from the ground up. After each race, they're taken apart, inspected and rebuilt. Some parts come from Chevrolet; others are built in the lab. All parts are retooled to give cars maximum performance within NASCAR regulations. Engines are tested at full throttle with dynamometers to ensure they will withstand a grueling five-hour race.

Engineers at RCR are trained to deal with some of the most powerful engines in the automotive industry. The V-8 Winston Cup engine runs at about 750 horsepower, with speeds as high as 200 mph. It has a 12.5:1 compression ratio with a maximum 358 cubic inches. A Busch series engine runs at about 500 horsepower with a 9.5:1 compression ratio and a maximum of 358 cubic inches.

There are several ways to make a race car engine gain more horsepower, but one of the most difficult is cylinder head porting. "The cylinder head port is the heartbeat of the engine," says Greg Jones, design engineer at RCR. "It's pivotal to the success of the car. Except for the cam shaft, cylinder head porting is the most guarded secret in an engine department."

Cylinder head ports allow air and fuel to travel through the cylinders. The more cylinders there are in a car, the more power it has. Cylinder head porting involves engineers reshaping the ports to remove flaws and improve efficiency. It also reduces restrictions in the engine's intake and exhaust tracts, allowing more air and fuel into the cylinders, thus increasing horsepower. "We've gone through six cylinder head designs in six months," says Jones. "We're constantly searching for better performance."

For years, cylinder head porting at RCR was done through a labor-intensive hand-grinding process. It took about 40 hours to complete just one cylinder head. "It would take a total of two weeks to complete a pair of heads," remembers Jones. "This is not acceptable with the current racing schedule, and any small bit of human error from port to port could decrease the horsepower."

Raindrop Geomagic Studio 3-D photography software, working in conjunction with other technologies, has been implemented at RCR to create a process that delivers a precisely made cylinder head in less time. Geomagic Studio makes it possible for engineers to take output from 3-D data, capture the texture and shape of the cylinder heads and transform the information into models that can be used again and again.

Geomagic Studio provides a complete solution for 3-D photography, the process of capturing output from 3-D scanners, rapidly processing color, shape and texture information, and automatically creating 3-D digital models for customized manufacturing and computer graphics applications. It supports all 3-D digitizers, cameras and scanners in native or XYZ/ ASCII format and handles ordered and unordered, surface and volume data.

"Geomagic allows us to take the model from its digitized state and surface it," says Jones. "We can visualize it a lot quicker and it allows us to make alterations right there on the screen. Visualization is important because we can determine if there are any glitches in our data that will be machined in the CAM package."

The cylinder heads are first digitized with a CMM. The data is pulled into Geomagic Studio, converted into a polygonal model, then to a NURBS model, and finally exported into a water-tight surface that can be manufactured within 0.001 in. of the original model.

"In this business, you have to be very accurate," says Jones. "Any fraction off can mean the difference between winning and losing a race. Geomagic Studio is as accurate as I've ever seen."

RCR engineers use Pro-NC software from Parametric Technology Corp. to complete the design process. The digital design model is then sent to the RCR manufacturing division, where an Okuma CNC machine produces the finished product. The entire process of porting two cylinder heads, which used to take up to 80 hours, now only takes 12.

"Everything is based on performance in this industry," says Jones. "Geomagic helps make optimum performance possible. The beauty of it is that we only have to make one model, then we can copy it. This saves us a tremendous amount of time in production."

Raindrop Geomagic's Geomagic Studio

Benefits

• Automatically creates 3-D digital models
• Supports all 3-D digitizers, cameras and scanners
• Points, polygon and NURBS modeling

www.geomagic.com