Lead Chief Investigator
Other Chief Investigators & Partner Investigators
Project Team
Project Partners
Technical Case
Material cost accounts for between 60- 70% of a component price in automotive manufacturing, meaning there is a considerable efficiency opportunity in cost reduction. This project aims to take a holistic approach to vehicle structural components and system design considering the materials and processes investigated in the Training Centre. For example, roll forming has a material usage of over 80%, implying that this type of process could improve the part costs for crash structures.
The P11 Subproject will develop a number of new manufacturing processes and new materials. Most of these manufacturing processes (FRF, Incremental Forming, Additive Manufacturing, Hot stamping/stamping, aluminium castings) will all have the ability to quickly build part families and part variants. It is, therefore, important to understand whether the part family can be formed using one of the Training Centre manufacturing processes. This subproject will investigate a system that determines the conditions when it best to use a particular material and manufacturing process. This will require a multi-objective optimisation that will need to take into account geometry and loading conditions, formed material constraints, and manufacturing constraints. The optimisation will need to determine
where and when a part can be cut into several parts using the given manufacturing processes (FRF, Incremental Forming, Additive manufacturing, and aluminium castings). The science novelty in this project may be in the ability to generically describe part families
using a combination of geometry descriptions of a part with its variants and loading information and then matching this with material and manufacturing information from the processes.