Project description
New manufacturing process for aluminium parts
Aluminium’s excellent properties, such as high strength-to-weight ratio, durability, formability and recyclability, render it a suitable alternative to steel for car components. Typically, aluminium alloys are being injected at high pressure into a cold chamber. However, existing metal-forming processes that allow creating complex aluminium parts are inefficient. The EU-funded MPDCA project aims to process aluminium alloys through hot chamber die casting. Researchers will adapt this process to aluminium by incorporating a unique injection pump with corrosion-resistant composites. This advanced process is expected to produce higher-quality aluminium parts, reduce investment and operational costs by 20 %, and reduce energy use by 25 %.
Objective
"Aluminium’s desirable properties – high strength-to-weight ratio, durability, formability and recyclability, among others – are increasing its demand both in Europe and globally, mostly by the automotive sector, driven to replace heavy steel car parts in order to improve fuel efficiency and comply with stringent carbon emission mandates (the 95g/km carbon emission 2020 target). This vastly contributes to the forecast growth of aluminium castings from the current €47billion to €66.8billion by 2020.
We at Newmec s.r.l manufacturers of die casting machinery, have realised that die casters and car makers – our targeted users – are producing aluminium parts using inefficient cold chamber die casting method, thus hindering the full potential of aluminium. The limitations of this sole technology for aluminium die casting are ranging from higher energy consumption, lower part quality/mechanical properties to more capital coupled with high operation & maintenance costs.
Our solution lies in #MPDCA, the innovative hot chamber medium pressure die casting process for aluminium. #MPDCA adapts the hot chamber die casting process to aluminium by incorporating a unique injection pump with novel anti molten aluminium corrosion composites. The benefits of #MPDCA speak by themselves: high quality aluminium parts; 20% lower investment and operational costs; 25% reduction in energy use and 35% less footprint; possible retrofit on cold chamber die casting technology.
In Phase1, we plan to validate the design specifications of the injection pump, outline the validation test guidelines and consolidate our commercialisation strategy and business plan. These activities will supplement our €1 million worth of work already invested to bring #MPDCA to its current TRL6 status. We expect a €24 million accumulated profit after 5 years of exploitation of the technology."
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- engineering and technologymaterials engineeringcomposites
- engineering and technologymechanical engineeringvehicle engineeringautomotive engineering
- natural scienceschemical sciencesinorganic chemistrypost-transition metals
- engineering and technologyenvironmental engineeringenergy and fuels
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Programme(s)
- H2020-EU.2.1.2. - INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP - Leadership in enabling and industrial technologies – Nanotechnologies Main Programme
- H2020-EU.2.1.5. - INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP - Leadership in enabling and industrial technologies - Advanced manufacturing and processing
- H2020-EU.2.1.3. - INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP - Leadership in enabling and industrial technologies - Advanced materials
- H2020-EU.2.3.1. - Mainstreaming SME support, especially through a dedicated instrument
Funding Scheme
SME-1 - SME instrument phase 1Coordinator
25064 GUSSAGO
Italy
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.