PES Performance and their project partners Tinsley Bridge and the AMRC Composites Centre, are celebrating being shortlisted for a prestigious engineering innovation award.
The Awards ceremony, for The Engineer magazine’s ‘Collaborate to Innovate Awards’, will be held in London next February, and will see their project to develop a high-performance anti-roll bar for HGV trucks and trains, go up against other projects in the Automotive category of the Awards.
The shortlisted Lightweight Metal Composite Hybrid (LiMeCH) project, received £400,000 in funding from Innovate UK, and has aimed to create a hybrid metal/composite anti roll bar; a key part of a vehicle’s suspension unit.
Carbon fibre composites are not yet widely used in the volume automotive sector for functional parts such as suspension systems where the industry standard is a steel tube welded to metallic end fittings.
Replacing the steel tube with lighter materials can reduce component weight by 30%, improve fuel efficiency, and help helping 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 “, adds Mike Maddock, managing director of PES Performance. “It is good that the Awards recognise the importance of collaboration in the development of innovative engineering solutions.
“Through working with our long-term partners at Tinsley Bridge & the AMRC Composites Centre, we have all brought our own specialist knowledge and expertise to the project to develop a real-world solution that can assist the HGV and Rail industries.”
