This week Performance Engineered Solutions (PES), with their project partners Tinsley Bridge and the AMRC Composites Centre, will be competing against other ground-breaking projects for a prestigious national engineering innovation award.
The Awards ceremony, for The Engineer magazine’s ‘Collaborate to Innovate Awards’, will be held in London on Thursday evening, and will see the Sheffield-based project to develop a high-performance anti-roll bar for HGV trucks and trains, go up against other ventures in the Automotive category of the Awards.
The shortlisted Lightweight Metal Composite Hybrid (LiMeCH) project, received £400,000 in funding from Innovate UK, and created a hybrid metal/composite anti roll bar; a key part of a vehicle’s suspension unit.
Currently the volume automotive sector uses steel tube welded to metallic end fittings, for functional parts such as suspension systems. The LiMeCH project has shown that replacing the steel anti-roll bar tube with lighter materials such as carbon fibre composites, can reduce component weight by 30%, improve fuel efficiency, and help operators meet new emissions regulations.
Another bonus is that composite materials are less affected by fatigue and so their use can deliver increased reliability without compromising performance.
“Lightweighting is top of the agenda for our customers,” said Russell Crow, director of engineering at Tinsley Bridge. “That is even more so when they are looking at alternative propulsion systems, such as electric drive trains and alternative fuels, because every gram they can save offsets the additional mass they have to carry for the batteries or hydrogen fuel tank.”
“We are very pleased to have been shortlisted for this award, amongst such prestigious other finalists,” adds Mike Maddock, managing director of PES Performance. “It shows the importance of collaboration in the development of innovative engineering design solutions, both within the automotive sector, and across all areas of advanced manufacturing and engineering.”
The other projects shortlisted for the Award are.
- Blanc Robot, a project by Oxbotica & Applied EV to develop a fully autonomous, multi-purpose electric delivery vehicle.
- A project by MAHLE Powertrain with Bramble Energy to create a hydrogen fuel cell system for use in light commercial vans.
- ResilientWorks; laboratory campus for the development of autonomous vehicles and electricity infrastructure, created by Thales, the Welsh Government and Cardiff University.
