ADVANCED MANUFACTURING NOW Lawrence E. Brown
Lightweight Manufacturing Hub Starts with Iron a T
he clock is ticking in the automotive industry, and the target numbers that loom are 54.5 by 2025, referring to the corporate average fuel economy standard that’s now in place. Since a small vehicle can gain a 2.4% fuel economy gain with just a 5% weight reduction in city driving, it’s clear that lightweighting technologies are going to be an important factor in the race to hit 54.5 miles per gallon. What may not be as clear is where the lightweighting breakthroughs will come from. However, the work we have done at LIFT—Lightweight Innova- tions for Tomorrow—does offer some possibilities, and they may be surprising to some. Ironically—pun intended—iron alloys are part of LIFT’s fi rst technical project, which will focus on thin-wall casting processes to take weight from a differential casing that Grede supplies Eaton for automotive customers. Iron generally does not come to mind quickly when you think about lightweight metals, but it makes sense when you consider the overall goals of the project. First, a small volume of iron saved in a casting yields a relatively high weight savings. Second, working with alloys with well- known properties also reduces the variables in test conditions, and that may speed the development of manufacturing-ready processes. Finally, if you rule out a few electric vehicles, every one of the tens of millions of cars and trucks in America has a differential. A few ounces of weight saved in one powertrain could yield millions of pounds of weight and energy savings. Our second melt processing technical project also has a twist—we are removing air from aluminum die-cast parts to make them lighter. Forcing molten aluminum through dies in high-speed production lines introduces microscopic bubbles into the castings. Those bubbles compromise the metal’s strength, so designers add thickness to compensate. By extracting the air from the die just before the metal enters we can eliminate the bubbles. That allows us to reduce cross-sectional thickness and lighten the fi nished parts. While we are looking at several automotive applications for this technology, Boeing is our lead industry partner, so we can honestly say we intend to take air out of airplanes, too. Those two projects are underway right now and have two- year overall timelines, but we also have projects in our pipeline
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AdvancedManufacturing.org | November 2015
that involve other manufacturing processes, all of which have potential for production-volume breakthroughs. Among them: • Melt processing • Thermomechanical processing • Powder processing • Joining • Coatings • Agile, low-cost tooling
A cross-cutting theme in our work is Integrated Computa- tional Materials Engineering (ICME). Here, we employ a computer simulation approach by way of advanced modeling techniques to characterize a material’s properties at different scales, from the microscopic to the fi nal component. Then, we integrate them into a single “super-model.”
Iron generally does not come to mind quickly when you think about light- weight metals, but it makes sense considering the overall goal.
We recognize that the processes I have described are well known in laboratories, and variations of them may even be producing parts in small volumes. Turning these laboratory breakthroughs into manufacturing-ready processes is what LIFT, and the other hubs in the National Network for Manu- facturing Innovation, are all about. There is a signifi cant gap between the research knowledge in America’s outstanding universities and laboratories and the production knowledge in America’s factories.
LIFT and the other manufacturing institutes are bridging that gap with a government-sponsored, industry-led and well- organized process. We are identifying metal manufacturing process breakthroughs with high-production potential, orga- nizing groups of research and industry partners, and managing their collaboration as they bring the processes to manufactur- ing readiness. You could say we are giving a LIFT to scale up lightweight metal manufacturing. That’s an exciting prospect— but not as exciting as the results we expect to deliver.
Executive Director, LIFT Part of the National Network for Manufacturing Innovation (NNMI)
www.lift.technology
MODERN MANUFACTURING PROCESSES, SOLUTIONS & STRATEGIES
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