Hyundai and Kia's New 3D Printing Center Accelerates Product Development
Inside the new Additive Manufacturing Solution Center at Namyang R&D, Hyundai Motor and Kia use industrial 3D printing to turn digital designs into complex parts faster.
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What Happened
Inside Hyundai Motor Group's 'Digital R&D Revolution' series, Part 3 spotlights the Additive Manufacturing Solution Center (AMSC), a new facility in the Advanced Mobility Solutions building at the Namyang Research and Development Center. The center moves components directly from digital design to fabricated reality using industrial 3D printing, with reduced tooling requirements and greater material flexibility. It is the Group's first purpose-built facility dedicated to additive manufacturing research and production, established nearly three decades after Hyundai Motor Group introduced its first industrial 3D printer in 1996.
- Traditional uses molds, dies, and subtractive shaping; additive precisely layers material to build exact digital geometr
- Traditional is limited by factory equipment and costs of custom molds; additive enables complex geometries and weight-op
- Traditional generates material waste and longer development timelines; additive reduces waste and enables rapid prototyp
- Vat Photopolymerization: Digital Light Processing (DLP) and Stereolithography Apparatus (SLA) for detailed polymer parts
- Polymer Powder Bed Fusion (PBF): fuses powdered polymer without supports; vapor smoothing yields finishes comparable to injection-molded parts
- Metal Powder Bed Fusion: high-energy lasers melt metal powders into complex, production-grade metal components
- Directed Energy Deposition (DED-WAAM): welding-arc technology deposits metal layer by layer, suited to large structural parts in steel, stainless steel, aluminum, and titanium
Every fabricated component undergoes rigorous validation in the Quality Inspection Cell, where dimensional measurements, tensile strength, bending stiffness, and impact resistance are checked against production-equivalent standards. In-house material verification and metallurgical analysis help ensure additive-manufactured parts meet the same quality expectations as conventionally produced components. Post-processing is demonstrated by a vehicle motor housing showing both its as-printed DED-WAAM structure and a computer numerical control (CNC)-machined finish.
- Vehicle development: rapid prototyping of prototypes, development components, manufacturing jigs and fixtures, and service parts for discontinued vehicles or emergency needs
- Heritage restoration: recreating legacy parts via 3D scanning and reverse engineering, such as a digitally reconstructed Hyundai Pony side-sill
- Motorsports: producing anti-roll bar blades, damper brackets, and brake duct rails for lightweight yet rigid racing components
- Manufacturing operations: expanding into high-value applications such as equipment consumables and manufacturing tools
“We are rapidly internalizing additive manufacturing technologies through a growing range of applications across the Group. Beyond vehicle components, we are expanding their use in high-value applications such as equipment consumables and manufacturing tools.”
The center also advances Design for Additive Manufacturing (DfAM), optimizing components for part consolidation, lattice structures, and lightweight geometries. As the Group's additive manufacturing hub, the AMSC's integrated capabilities — design, production, post-processing, and validation — anchor its manufacturing competitiveness. The series notes that as modern cars shift toward software-defined vehicles (SDVs), hardware is only half the battle, and the next installment will show the NOVA Lab testing a vehicle's electrical architecture before a physical prototype exists.
Why this matters
Additive manufacturing lets engineers design parts without traditional mold or machining limits, cutting development time and waste while enabling lighter, stronger components. That could mean faster launches and easier replacement parts for discontinued vehicles, plus lightweight, rigid components for motorsports. The center shows how the automaker group is moving hardware development toward digital-first production.
Terms in This Story
- Additive manufacturing
- Building objects by depositing material layer by layer from a digital design, rather than cutting material away; commonly known as 3D printing.
- DED-WAAM
- Directed Energy Deposition – Wire Arc Additive Manufacturing; a 3D printing process that uses a welding arc to deposit metal layer by layer, suited to large parts.
- Powder Bed Fusion
- A 3D printing process that uses lasers or other energy to fuse layers of powdered material (polymer or metal) into a solid part.
- Design for Additive Manufacturing (DfAM)
- Designing parts specifically to exploit 3D printing's capabilities, such as complex lattice structures or consolidated components.
Summarised from the linked release; details can be imperfect — always verify against the original source.