High Volume Lightweight Technologies for Vehicle Structures (HiLiTe)

The project is a collaboration between Tata Motors European Technical Centre, a wholly owned subsidiary of Tata Motors, India’s largest automotive company and owner of Jaguar Land Rover, two higher educational establishments: Warwick Manufacturing Group part of the University of Warwick and the National Composites Centre, and two SMEs: Expert Tooling and Automation a leading supplier of automation and assembly systems to automotive OEMs and Tier 1 suppliers and FAR-UK a new design and manufacturing consultancy but with over 20 years of automotive composites experience. The programme will address the current limitations preventing high volume usage of composite components in the automotive industry. These limitations are:
1. Material and processing cost – making them uncompetitive compared to metallic solutions
2. Processing time - current too long by an order of magnitude.
3. Lower volume techniques generate a high percentage of waste material.
4. Incompatibility with post production processes used in high volumes e.g. the high temperatures used in E coat and paint application.