Following a successful round of competitive funding through the TSB Low Carbon Vehicle Program, we are delighted to announce the formation of the ALSAM project partnership.
The £1.1M ALSAM project will focus on developing process knowledge, materials and software toolsets for the manufacture of light weight aluminium lattice structures using Selective Laser Melting. The ALSAM project will be lead by Econolyst in partnership with Delphi, Loughborough University, Renishaw, Axon Automotive, Alcon & Delcam.
ALSAM is in direct response to the increasing pressure to develop cleaner and greener products both from consumers and legislative bodies. The reasons for these pressures are two-fold, firstly the requirement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) and secondly, reduce society’s burden on natural resources, such as oil, and consequently mitigate the increasing price pressures of these resources.
OEM and Tier suppliers have and are still focused on an increase in efficiency in the products that they manufacture and have shown substantial increases in fuel economy over the past 10-20 years. However, one area that has been relatively overlooked is that of design optimisation incorporating lattice design methods and the use of novel manufacturing methods to produce conventionally unrealisable geometries from existing metallic materials. The development of Additive Manufacturing (AM) and particularly Selective Laser Melting (SLM) has the potential to enable a new type of manufacturing business, enabling high-tech and increasingly knowledge-based products through design and reduced manufacturing constraints. SLM has previously been used to produce parts in Titanium alloys for the aerospace industry, and coupled with design optimisation tools, has proven a potential for weight saving of existing products.
However, the complex nature of these structures and consequent difficulties in their analysis means that they are completely unproven as a way of reducing the mass of components or improving performance. The ALSAM project aims to augment this potential and couple these lattice structures with the only manufacturing technology capable of producing such components, namely SLM.
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