EFRE research project: LightWeightTankMat
The overall goal of the joint project LightWeightTankMat is to signigicantly reduce the weight of plastic fuel tanks for car applications For this purpose, a new lightweight material is developed.
Nowadays the required product properties, like increased stiffness at elevated temperatures or improved crash performance at low temperatures, can only be achieved by an increased use of material. The increased environmental awareness of the population and the increasingly stringent limits on CO2 emissions from cars to mitigate the consequences of climate change, requires the development of new lightweight tank concepts. Within the LightWeightTankMat project new material concepts are developed and analyzed for their potential and gradually optimized in process technology and simulative investigations. The production-ready implementation of the materials and process concept, is one major focus of the investigations in order to ensure a timely transfer of the results into operational practice.
Research objective
The Aachen Center for Integrative Lightweight Production (AZL) of RWTH Aachen University is engaged in the project "LightWeightTankMat" to deal with the technical joining issues arising from the development of novel fuel tank. This includes the selection of suitable joining methods based on specific requirements of the material- and production-process-, the investigation and qualification of selected joining processes and the formulation of the resulting demands on component design and manufacturing process.
Another task of the AZL is to assess the efficiency of the developed materials and component design and to show possibilities to transfer the technology into other industries. Moreover, in cooperation with the project partners, the respective developments are transferred into a production-based demonstrator.
Project partner
This research project is promoted by
Further questions about this project
