B3 Technologies, led by legendary F1 designer and materials pioneer John Bannard, is one of the few independant contractors confident and capable of working with titanium at high levels of complexity and in demanding application enviroments. This capability is hard won, and when most in Formula 1 were having second thoughts about the use of titanium, after some initial catastrophic failures, Bannard preservered and mastered the technigues required to work effectively with it, at low factors of safety.
B3 Technologies has evolved from Ferrari Design and Developement (FDD), Ferrari's Formula 1 design and R&D facility set up by Bannard in Guilford in the UK in 1992. There is a perception that Formula 1 is a "money no object" activity, but this is not always true. What is the case is "no compromise on quality" and this ethic remains at B3 Technologies today, as strongly as it did at FDD. John Bannard is the engineer who introduced the Formula 1 world to the carbon fibre monocoque chassis, semi-automatic gearboxes, fabricated titanium and carbon fibre gearboxes, as well as many other less recognised design features that people in Formula 1 circles simply take for granted.
...Titanium is very useful in lots of areas, but there are situations where is it inappriopiate. "It's affectively half as stiff as steel and it's a little under half the weight. Sometimes that works for you, sometimes it doesn't. If you're making torsion bars, it's unlikely that you'll make them lighter in titanium. In 1993/94 we started making uprights from titanium. This was after we had done some extensive work to perfect the welding. We had built purge tanks to exclude oxygen from the welding operation. By that time we could achieve completely non-contaminated welds."
"One of the major problems with titanium is that it is quite difficult to get any depth of hardness on the surface to allow for wear. The hard skin is inherently stiff and the titanium substarte is relatively flexible. It can be a problem unless it's relatively lowly stressed. With steel components you can case harden them, but titanium is much more difficult. However, they are more and more surface treatments coming , which provide hard skins. The problem is that these hard skins are not very thicjk- microns rather than millimetres. When someone comes along with the treatment that will produce a relatively thick hardened surface with a nice gradual transition in hardness to the metal substrate, then I will think the uses of titanium will open up even more. Generally you won't get away with it in titanium alone. You have to use a hardened steel sleeve or insert for a bearing."
"As far as price of titanium is concerned, it varies between four and six times the price of steel and depends on what you're buying. Smaller sizes are more expensive, relativley speaking. There is a skin on the surface which has to be removed after the smelting and the forging. As you get down to smaller bar stcock, the percentage that has to be removed is porportionately higher. It is so expensive mainly because it uses vast amounts of electricity in it's production."
"For the titanium upright we make, you have to start with a fairly massive billet for the centre. This is machined and wire-eroded to produce the finned bearing carrier, and the rest is welded to it. The material cost for the upright could come to about L700, but because of the amount of work involved, the final cost is something like L7000-L8000 each."
Most of the F1 teams have fairly substantial machine shops nowadays, but here is still a lot of work getting out-sourced. "Companies like us take the overflow, or the wortk that they can't handle from a capacity point of view or work that they can't do from a technical point of view," Bannard said. "In some cases we do things that the big teams don't want to because it might be very tricky or time consuming."
"We've got a lot of experience at doing these things- it takes time to gain experience. It's easier to do something that's been done before- it takes a lot more effort to be a pioneer."
"And we have the expertise to work in all knids of materials, particularly in carbon and titanium. Because of this wealth of expertise, we can look at a project and evaluate the best way of making it without being restricted to a narrow or limited set of possible solutions. Design is not just about making a fancy componenet, it's about making optimum choices, taking into account cost, time and manufacturability."
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