Objective
All car manufacturers are concerned in weight decrease in
order to get lower fuel consumption and toxic gas
emissions. Numerous attempts were developped in each car
company; common research programmes such as the European
ones (BRITE, EUREKA) including car manufacturers and
material suppliers are now running. More performing
steels and now aluminium alloys and now stainless steels
are the most involved materials. In spite of some
endeavour for top class cars, difficulties remain
unsolved to use these w advanced metallic materials for
mass production. The aim of this Project is to study some
of them in view of short term applications.
The objectives of this project aim at reaching a weight
saving of 10 15% for a whole Body InWhite, up to 30% for
some given parts. Moreover, the Project will enable to
shorten the setting up of the industrial manufacturing
processes up to a 50% time and cost saving, which
represents 50 60 kEcu per part. The induced global
development cost per new vehicle can be reduced by 10 20
Mecu.
The materials involved are:
HSLA and very high strenght heat treatable steels,
uncoated and pre painted steel and aluminium sheets,
laminated steel and aluminium sheets and stainless
steel.
The three main phases of this project gathering 4
manufacturers, 3 two material suppliers, two software
companies and one Research Institute are:
better knowledge in material behaviour,
development and increase of performance of forming
processes focusing on numerical simulation,
production of industrial parts with mass production
tools.
At the end of the Project, most of present difficulties
will be solved and the setting up of these materials will
be greatly facilitated and used for industrial
production.
Topic(s)
Funding Scheme
CSC - Cost-sharing contracts
Coordinator
78288 Guyancourt
France
Participants (8)
293 80 Olofström
8005 Zurich
3965 Chippis
10043 Orbassano
94578 Rungis
71059 Sindelfingen
57191 Florance
70174 Stuttgart
