Structures & Materials
A key technology to help reduce CO2 emissions is the utilisation of lightweight materials and how these behave in a structural component. Materials also help to achieve better mitigation of impacts and crashes, improve configurability by designers giving them a greater number of styles and faster product development timescales.
The development of more cost effective materials and coatings as well as modular structures are needed to maintain and improve profitability for low investment/low volume programmes.
European End-of-Life Vehicles Directive on requires improvements in the ability to re-use and recycle materials .New and emerging materials will need to have that ability. Polymers or polymeric materials will need special consideration in this area.
Research priorities have been identified as:
- Low investment, short cycle time, single sided access joining technologies for metallic and composite materials and having an inbuilt process monitor/validation mechanism
- Predictive simulation of plastics, composites and foams under high strain rate conditions
- Low investment, environmentally acceptable corrosion resistant pre treatments for light metals (e.g. aluminium, magnesium)
- Medium and high volume techniques for the manufacture of low weight structural composite components and hybrid structural joining techniques to enable their use in predominantly metallic structures.
- Robust manufacturing processes to enable the production of recyclable components and assemblies having structural, cosmetic and integrated electrical/electronic functions.
- Low volume modular manufacturing techniques.