Training for greener vehicles
Vehicles of the future will be green and silent. Yet, achieving the goal under current university training structures will be difficult owing to the specialisation and fragmentation in the field. The EU-funded GRESIMO (Best training for green and silent mobility (GRESIMO)) project integrated the various subdisciplines of automotive engineering. The project offered early-stage researchers from three engineering specialties training and interdisciplinary research opportunities. The topics united noise, vibration and harshness (NVH), lightweight design, and electrification and hybridisation. The project helped students find relevant and innovative PhD questions, combining at least two of the project's research topics. Other support included personalised career development plans for each candidate, as well as training events, including technical workshops, summer schools and complementary skills courses. Interdisciplinary research outcomes included new methods of improving the efficiency of optimisation algorithms. The algorithms were applied to problems such as lightweight design, NVH and passive safety requirements. The team developed a ray-tracing method to characterise lightweight, absorbent materials, plus a way of dealing with the presence of dampening structures composed of metamaterials. Other studies included topology optimisation of composite materials. Finally, the work investigated structural optimisation in terms of fatigue life criteria. As a result of GRESIMO, young researchers were more able to integrate separate engineering fields. Such work brings green vehicles of the future a step closer.
Keywords
Training and research, automotive engineering, optimisation algorithms, lightweight materials, GRESIMO
