What if vehicles could be both lighter and safer for the environment and passengers?
Have you ever wondered if there’s a way to make vehicles stronger and lighter without compromising crash resistance and passengers’ safety?
As the automotive industry faces increasing pressure to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and enhance passenger safety, innovation in lightweight construction has become more crucial than ever. However, these goals often seem to clash. Heavier structures are typically needed to improve passenger protection, but they also lead to more severe crashes. There’s a direct relationship between a vehicle’s mass and the severity of crashes, including dashboard intrusion, which increases the risk to passengers.
The challenge is further complicated by additional crash test requirements, such as oblique, offset, and movable deformable barriers. These tests demand even more robust (and typically heavier) vehicle structures using current materials and manufacturing approaches.
In this scenario, the Flexcrash project, funded under the Horizon Europe programme, aims to break the vicious circle of weight and crash resistance by producing safer, lighter, and circular crash-tolerant structures.
Just check out this video to understand a bit more about the Flexcrash project:
The Flexcrash platform
Flexcrash, made up by a consortium of 10 partners from 5 European countries, identifies emerging and security needs in the context of current and future mobility. This includes evaluating trends in autonomous vehicles, new forms of urban mobility and human tendencies.
Early identification of these needs is essential to developing safe crash tolerant structures that respond to new traffic scenarios while aligning with market demands and supporting future regulations.
To address these challenges, Flexcrash started developing a new online platform enabling traffic experts, regulators, developers, and other professionals, to study real-time interactions between human drivers and autonomous vehicles (AVs) in simulated mixed-traffic environments. By enabling experimentation with future AV scenarios, the platform helps identify critical situations not covered by current crash databases and not yet covered by regulations.
The Flexcrash platform enables simultaneous interactions between multiple users —both human and simulated —in scenarios of car crash simulations.
Hybrid manufacturing and advanced materials
Once identified the future traffic scenarios, Flexcrash project designs and manufactures a demonstrator of the frontend car structure. To do that, the project introduces a hybrid manufacturing process, combining traditional methods like extrusion and High Pressure Die Casting (HPDC) with laser metal deposition (LMD) as additive manufacturing approach. This technology allows to create Added-Value Functional Features (AVFF) improving the performances of the components making use of efficient manufacturing processes and, reduces material use and vehicles weight.
Additionally, the Flexcrash project leverages advanced materials like high-performance aluminium alloys to optimize structural components, reducing weight while maintaining safety. Advanced High Strength Steels aluminium alloys are the dominant materials used in vehicle body construction (Body-in-White, BiW), due to their strength, allowing thinner sheets without compromising performance or recyclability. These materials and design techniques are rigorously tested and validated.
The Flexcrash project represents an important step towards the future of safety in autonomous vehicles and emerging mobility. Through the development of hybrid and flexible manufacturing technologies, as well as the creation of crash-tolerant structures, Flexcrash has the potential to save lives and significantly reduce injuries in traffic accidents.
