Case Study: Toyota Motor Corporation achieves 72% car seat volume reduction and reduced heat capacity with Materialise Build Processor

Materialise Slicing Technology Enables Toyota’s Lightweight Car Seat

Toyota Motor Corporation, together with Toyota Central R&D Labs Inc., wanted to produce a revolutionary lightweight car seat prototype with minimal volume and optimized heat capacity but faced challenges in creating and handling the extremely complex, large topology-optimized design. They engaged Materialise, using Materialise’s engineering team and tools (including Materialise 3-matic and Materialise Build Processor) to translate topology data into a manufacturable 3D model and to manage the massive file sizes.

Materialise developed a new unit cell in Materialise 3-matic, removed dangling edges and added an elastic-beam surface pattern for comfort, and used Materialise Build Processor’s slice-based operations to keep files manageable (estimated STL 250 GB vs. metadata 36 MB) and drive the printer for laser sintering. The result: seat volume fell by 72%, weight dropped from 25 kg to 7 kg, and heat capacity decreased from 35.4 to 14.5 J/K, enabling production of the prototype and spurring new software features for future Toyota applications.

Toyota Motor Corporation