HALO Hybrid Automotive Lightweight Optimisation

The is a great pressure on the UK vehicle manufacturers to reduce fuel consumption and lower CO2 emissions.

Great improvements in these requirements have taken place over recent years mostly by the development of highly fuel efficient engines. This trend of improved engines will not be sufficient to meet impending legislative requirements on carbon emissions. Therefore weight reduction of vehicles is vitally important. This must be done cost competitively, consumers would not pay much more for vehicles so cost effective solutions must be found. This programme seeks to find new ways of producing optimised structures using the approach of applying different materials where they are needed. This novel part of this technology is to develop the modelling techniques that allow the efficient use of these multiple materials. By doing this, both weight optimised and cost optimised structures can be produced.