FASTENING & JOINING | LIGHTWEIGHTING
JLOIGIHNTINWGE TIGOH ATIDIN G
Reducing CO2 emissions
is a core initiative in the
automotive industry and
material lightweighting
is a key technique that can be
implemented to support this. Original
Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) in
the automotive industry have set out
an objective to signi cantly reduce
the weight of vehicle structures, and
composite materials are central to
this process of weight reduction.
Despite recent material processing
advances, uptake of composites in the
medium to high volume automotive
manufacturing sector has been
restricted by the challenge of joining
composites to metals in a body-shop
environment.
A consortium of partners including
Far-UK, Gestamp, Ansys Granta,
Jaguar Land Rover, Nissan Motor
Manufacturing (UK) Ltd., Scott
Bader, Stadco, TWI and WMG at the
University of Warwick launched the
Innovate UK-funded LightJoin project
in April 2017. Focusing on overcoming
this challenge of joining composites
WMG is working with a consortium to explore joining
technologies and develop innovative lightweight
structures in the automotive industry
to metals, the consortium explored
joining techniques to enable multiple
materials to be used in a ‘Body-in
White’ structure; the main structure
that sits under the surfaces of a
vehicle.
As OEMs on the project, Jaguar
Land Rover and Nissan were
interested in exploring lap shear,
fatigue and environmental data to
ensure material joining processes are
as informed and ef cient as possible.
Providing testing standards and
their automotive expertise, JLR and
Nissan were interested in the concept
of producing a database to make
joining selection more ef cient. Bob
Bateman, Senior Engineer at Nissan
Technical Centre, Europe said:
“We wanted to better understand
the process of joining composites
to metals, particularly in relation to
design, and LightJoin produced a set
of results that we fed directly back to
our Headquarters in Japan.
“This will leave Nissan with
a better understanding of the
requirements around building a
multi-material car. LightJoin has
justi ed Nissan’s efforts in terms of
conducting research in the UK, and
has triggered a number of other
composites-based projects that we’ve
been involved in since.”
To help increase the uptake
of lightweight composites in
medium- to high-volume automotive
manufacturing and help the
consortium determine suitable
material and joining combinations,
WMG introduced information
technology experts Ansys Granta to
the project with the idea of creating an
innovative collaborative database
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