Lightweight Material

3 Key excerpts on "Lightweight Material"

• 

  eBook - ePub

  Materials for Lightweight Constructions

  • S. Thirumalai Kumaran, Tae Jo Ko, S. Suresh Kumar, Temel Varol, S. Thirumalai Kumaran, Tae Jo Ko, S. Suresh Kumar, Temel Varol(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • CRC Press

    (Publisher)

  The evolution of materials determines the evolution of the human stage. It should be noted that human evolution has been classified according to material as Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age, and Steel Age. The evolution of materials science is an important area for the development of various industrial sectors. The evolution of materials from clay-based ceramics to modern advanced materials depicts the evolution of human civilization. As a result, the material system is intimately linked to human development. In modern applications, advanced engineering materials are utilized, which deliver enhanced performance. The materials have been used in aircraft, construction, space, and military applications. Metals, semiconductors, ceramics, and polymers are the four main material classifications. Aside from these material systems, notable advanced materials such as nanomaterials, biomaterials, and energy materials can also be found. All of these materials differ in terms of structure, processing method, and properties. Lightweight Materials play a dominant role in aerospace and automotive applications because they are lighter and tougher, resulting in improved performance. In these applications, Lightweight Materials such as composites have been widely used. For example, a commercial plane, such as the Dreamliner, is made up of 50% composite materials. The manufacturing of these materials is also less expensive, but it is a labor-intensive process. Lightweight aluminum alloys in automobile applications reduce vehicle weight, save fuel, and are more temperature-resistant than conventional steel materials. These advancements were made with existing technology, so it’s no surprise that in the future, the scope of these materials can be found in a wide range of applications.

  1.2 Importance of Lightweight Materials

  One major problem with conventional materials (such as steel, cast iron, and so on) is weight. This single parameter leads to increase in cost, fuel consumption (in case of automotive), risk during assembly, etc. In many circumstances, it’s possible to replace conventional material with low-weight materials such as aluminum alloy, magnesium alloy, fiber-reinforced polymer composites, and so on. Such possibilities exist in different sectors like automotive, biomedical, construction, and aerospace applications. The following sections cover the importance of Lightweight Materials in the above-mentioned applications.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Lightweight Composite Structures in Transport

  Design, Manufacturing, Analysis and Performance

  • James Njuguna(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Woodhead Publishing

    (Publisher)

  Sustainable product development requires a balanced approach toward technological, economic, and ecological aspects. This chapter investigates the main input parameters and the various measures for vehicular structure design for sustainability in general and material selection for sustainable lightweight design in particular. This study proposes a set of metrics for material selection that takes all sustainability aspects into consideration. These metrics cover products' environmental impact, functionality, and manufacturability, in addition to the economical and societal factors. Moreover, this chapter discusses the role and impact of replacing steel with lighter engineering materials and how decision-making tools can act as a framework for eco-material selection.

  Keywords

  Eco-material selection; Life-cycle assessment; Lightweight design; Materials selection; Sustainability

  11.1. Introduction

  Design for sustainability, eco-material selection, and green product design are used interchangeably in automotive applications to refer to the material selection process of Lightweight Material that has minimal environmental impact over its entire lifetime. The origin of this science is rooted back to the era of the Arab oil embargo, when a majority of the original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) started to think about more fuel-efficient vehicles, which in turn initiated the basics of vehicular lightweight design. There are a few ways to reduce fuel consumption in the vehicle, such as improved power-train efficiency, new and advanced power trains like internal combustion–diesel hybrids and fuel cell vehicles, improving aerodynamics, adoption of alternative fuels, and reduction of the vehicle's mass. Above all, mass reduction is claimed to be the most effective and least costly way, but only if the reductions are significant (such as in the range of 20–40%) (Cheah, 2010 ).

  In fact, lightweight design pivots around two facts: First is the price of oil, which is reflected in the price of gas that consumers pay at the pump and has been increasing over the past several years. The second fact is that the public has become more conscious of environmental change and global warming (Montalbo et al., 2008 ), which has been reflected in government goals for fuel economy. For example, the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards in the United States have requested OEMs to meet certain levels of fuel economy at their fleet level. Although automakers have deployed several technologies to improve the fuel economy of their vehicles, reducing weight (“lightweighting”) is still one of the approaches they prefer, not only because it improves fuel economy, but also because of the emergence of advanced materials that may result in lower costs in association with good manufacturability. Lightweighting can be accomplished through downsizing, integrating parts and functions, material substitution, or a combination of these methods (Mayyas et al., 2012a ). Vehicle mass is known to play a major role in lightweight design as well as in the performance of the vehicle in terms of resistance to the road and fuel economy. Reducing the mass of the vehicle not only reduces the friction force with roads by reducing rolling resistance, but also reduces acceleration resistance and climbing resistance (as shown in Fig. 11.1 ). Fig. 11.1 also shows the effect of reducing vehicle mass on the overall fuel economy; generally speaking, a 100-kg savings in vehicle mass will result in a fuel savings of 0.3–0.5  L per 100  km and 0.85–1.4  kg CO2 per 100 

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Materials, Design and Manufacturing for Lightweight Vehicles

  • P.K. Mallick(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Woodhead Publishing

    (Publisher)

  Development of new manufacturing processes has also contributed to the selection and adoption of many of these mate-rials for lightweight designs. Examples of these manufacturing processes for metals are high-pressure die casting, tube hydroforming, and tailor-welded blanking, and for polymers and polymer matrix composites, over-molding, sandwich molding and high-pressure resin transfer molding. There is also a variety of user-friendly computer-aided engineering, finite element analysis, and design optimization software that have made it pos-sible to consider many different options for materials, design configura-tions, and manufacturing processes and include them to create lightweight vehicle designs in a relatively short vehicle development time. This chapter starts with a review of the basic material selection consid-erations for lightweight automotive design. The major effort in vehicle weight reduction is for body structure and body panels that constitute nearly 50% of the vehicle weight. As shown in Table 10.1 , their structural design requirements include stiffness, strength, fatigue durability, crash-worthiness, and noise, vibration and harshness (NVH). Material selection and design approaches to meet these design requirements are described. 405 Materials, Design and Manufacturing for Lightweight Vehicles DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-818712-8.00010-0 Copyright © 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Design optimization techniques to achieve vehicle weight reduction are briefly reviewed at the end of the chapter. 10.2 Material selection for lightweight automotive design For lightweight design for stiffness and strength, the key material proper-ties to consider are density ( ρ ), modulus ( E ), yield strength ( S y ), and fatigue strength ( S f ). If we consider a simple beam, its bending stiffness depends on the modulus of the material, loading conditions, support con-ditions, and its length, shape, and cross-sectional dimensions.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book