lightweight materials – holds the key to increased fuel and energy
M
efficiency, and reduced CO2 emissions. The body-in-white is the area in
which this could have the most impact. Replacing traditional steel bodies with aluminium, lighter weight steels, including advanced high strength steel (AHSS) and magnesium – or by using alternative materials, including carbon composites or plastics, either entirely or proportionally – will help alleviate some of the pressure that the automotive industry is under to reduce fuel consumption and emissions.
Fundamental changes So far, most progress in the area of alternative materials has been made at component level, although there are moves to replace the car body’s sheet metal components with alternatives, including BMW’s use of carbon fibre reduced plastics (CFRP) for its forthcoming i3 and i8 models, and the use of carbon fibre for hypercars, including the Ferrari LaFerrari and McLaren P1. But what if the fundamental
structural design of cars needs to change? The trend to reassess the manner in which vehicles are constructed is gaining momentum. One area that is attracting an increasing amount of interest is in the biomimicry or biologically inspired design. Unless you’re a naive creationist,
you’ll appreciate the massive contribution 3.8 billion years of evolution has made to the design of
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What can the automotive industry learn from nature when it comes to weight saving? Ryan Borroff has been finding out
the natural world. At the very least, Mother Nature’s design solutions to nature’s engineering problems could represent a huge saving to a manufacturer’s R&D budget, if OEMs take inspiration from, or mimic elements in, the natural world and apply them to their own engineering design. Today, the science of biomimicry is
evolving, due to advances in materials and manufacturing developments – particularly in the fields of carbon composites and 3D printing. The aerospace industry has been one of the first to look to the natural world for inspiration in the construction of aircraft. Aerospace has long been
www.automotivedesign.eu.com
ore than any other trend or technology, light weighting – building cars from increasingly
Mother Nature
Mercedes-Benz Bionic Car used Computer Aided Optimisation and Soft Kill Option software
May/June 2013
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