FutureCarProduction - Sustainable car body concepts for vehicle construction

The FutureCarProduction lead project focuses on the mobility lead market and develops solutions for sustainable and innovative car body concepts that go far beyond the current trend of giga-casting. Eight Fraunhofer Institutes are investigating the question of how production concepts for car bodies with state-of-the-art joining and casting technologies can be evaluated in terms of their effects on sustainability and recyclability in order to conserve resources and increase efficiency and performance.

In the project, Fraunhofer LBF is answering the question of how the reliability and safety of modern car body structures can be assessed and verified.

Car body construction for passenger cars is undergoing a process of change that is characterized by two important influences. These include the development of new body construction methods based on highly integrated large castings, in the sense of "giga-casting", which should lead to potential savings in the supply chain, as well as the implementation of sustainable and climate-neutral automotive manufacturing by 2050.

Production processes based on "FusionCASTING^®" composite casting

This is where the "FutureCarProduction" flagship project comes in with an outstanding innovation. As a goal: The development of new manufacturing processes based on composite casting "fusionCASTING®" to achieve highly integrated body structures from sheet metal forming, joining, and casting structures on the one hand, and the establishment of holistic solution approaches for evaluating of car body concepts in terms of sustainability, technical performance and costs. "FutureCarProduction" makes an important contribution to enabling companies to make robust decisions in the development of new car body concepts at an early stage in the development process by developing holistic methods and technologies. The solution approach of the overall project includes a method-based analysis and evaluation of vehicle and body architectures, considering conventional and innovative production processes (casting, forming, joining) as well as the sustainable use of materials by increasing the amount of recycled material.  

Designing and evaluating the safety, reliability and performance of body structures

Fraunhofer LBF's task within the project is to design the safety, reliability, and performance of car body structures and to make them assessable against each other, especially when using recycled materials. Both numerical and experimental simulation methods are used to optimize the composite cast structures to be developed in terms of lightweight design, service life, damage progression and safety for the application in the respective vehicle architecture. This includes the selection of the right body production method for the application, which represents the highest sustainability and reliability at the lowest cost.

Basic methods for the strength simulation of joints made of structural cast sheet metal and continuous cast sheet metal are being developed, which enable the reliability and safety of these joints to be designed and the influence of recycled material on reliability to be evaluated. For a holistic approach, not only classic sheet metal construction methods in combination with continuous casting profiles and multi-material composites based on welding and riveting processes were investigated, but also Fraunhofer's own approaches to composite casting "fusionCASTING®" as a highly integrative manufacturing option as a combination of structural casting, continuous casting profiles and welded/riveted structures were designed and evaluated. The results of the sub-project will enable wide-ranging and rapid application in automotive engineering to select the optimum body production method for specific vehicle architectures.