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  • Create Date February 9, 2024
  • Last Updated February 9, 2024

The deliverable describes the technical challenges of developing lightweight vehicles that must comply with safety regulations. It discusses various factors that influence the need for lightweight designs, the role of safety regulations, the complexity of safety systems, the demand for fuel efficiency, and advances in production technologies and material development.

The deliverable also highlights the importance of computational optimization techniques and manufacturing technologies in addressing these challenges. It highlights topology optimization and additive manufacturing as key methods for creating lightweight structures while maintaining strength and energy absorption capacity. To this end, the deliverable discusses the motivation for exploring new crash scenarios arising from the rise of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous driving. The need to improve safety, meet regulatory requirements and provide more information to consumers are cited as reasons for testing vehicles in a wider range of crash scenarios.

In addition, the deliverable provides an overview of current design practices for frontal crash systems, including passive and active safety features, materials used and simulation/testing methods. It emphasizes the role of advanced materials, active safety features and simulation/testing in improving frontal crash system design. The concept of computational optimization techniques is further explained, with emphasis on topology and size optimization. These methods are discussed in terms of their potential to reduce vehicle mass while ensuring structural integrity.

The project aims to integrate sustainable materials (e.g. recycled aluminum) into vehicle structures, develop or improve new manufacturing processes and use virtual development tools for crash-tolerant vehicle structures. Finally, the need for new test requirements and configurations based on the Gemate G3 GLAB demonstrator vehicle covering different crash scenarios is highlighted and the materials commonly used for crash structures such as steel, aluminum and composites are compared. The importance of recycled aluminum is highlighted due to its environmental and cost benefits.


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