Reducing the weight of structures

“An imperative: reduce the weight of structures”

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■  Respect for the environment and reduction of manufacturing and use costs require the weight of structures to be reduced. The need to be competitive means that developers have to make more and more effort to reduce mass transported or to bear.

■  In the coming years, new cars will be cheaper, with better performance levels, fuel efficient, safe, comfortable and light; the same is true for the rail sector or shipbuilding sector. This obligation to reduce weight is essential when it comes to transport, and also for mobile products (IT, mobile telephony, luggage, tools, small household electrical goods and sports equipment).

■  In the automobile field, international projects, for example ULSAB, demonstrate the competition that exists between materials: steel, whose elasticity limits are being pushed back all the time; aluminium, which is being used more and more, boosted by savings in implementation processes; magnesium, which is making a great entry in the vehicle sector, titanium in tennis rackets; polymers and composites and polymer alloys in car interiors as well as bodywork. Hybrid solutions of metallo-plastics and metallic foams are starting to find their place too. It’s a question of inventing semi-finished products that meet users’ constraints by focusing on the function to be performed and understanding that the choice of material is an essential factor that cannot be separated from its manufacturing process, which may or may not be suitable for large series.

■  Economic factors have also become stricter in the aeronautics, space and military field, where the same requirements for reducing weight are imposed on constructors and equipment manufacturers.

■  We know the economic impact of packaging on a product’s market value; the race for lighter products started a long time ago – in less than twenty years, the thickness of tinplate used in food tins has reduced from 0.20 mm to 0.14 mm, and the weight of an aluminium drinks can has reduced by half, dropping to 15 grams.

■  Research for new solutions for lighter products in highly technological sectors will benefit other fields where weight reduction has become as much an economic necessity as a marketing argument. In this context, industrial players have to design lighter products in order to stay in the international competition.

■  To contribute to this technological challenge and to help European companies and laboratories to rise to the challenge of reducing weight, Innovation 128 took the initiative in 1996 to propose a Technological Watch Programme, TechWatch, dedicated to this field.

Main themes

■  The specific properties of materials

Looking particularly at density, rigidity, endurance, mechanical resistance, corrosion, friction, repair, cost, stability of supply sources and environment constraints, the technology watch focuses in-depth on the following materials:

  • Steel
  • Aluminium
  • Magnesium
  • Titanium
  • Composites with metallic or ceramic matrices
  • Light cast iron
  • Polymers
  • Composites with organic matrices
  • Sandwich structures

■  Implementation processes

This looks notably at cost, investment, scheduling, “reparability”, series, assemblies and the capacity to produce complex forms.

■  Calculation and modelling

In particular CAD, prototyping, sizing and material resistance calculation tools and new mathematical methods.