Lightening and innovating transmission for improving vehicle: environmental impacts
For several decades, vehicles have seen their weight increase to meet more demanding requirements of safety and comfort. At the present time, manufacturers need drastically reduce the energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions without sacrificing any safety or comfort. Each vehicle element must be considered for weight reduction. In this regard, gear transmissions are a first choice candidate. They form a reliable, versatile, and efficient way to transfer power while representing a significant fraction of the vehicle’s mass. LIVE-I project main objective is to achieve breakthrough technological progress in the design of lightweight gear transmission and to build an innovative training network in order to educate early stage researchers in this hot topic. The technical objective of LIVE-I project is to demonstrate a significant weight reduction of transmission using advanced modeling tools and digital twins together with advanced materials and systems. This objective will be pursued along different ways, each starting with mass reduction and exploring ways to achieve compromises between weight, efficiency, noise and vibration impacts. The modeling will cope with physical complexities of the problem, connected to non-linearities, multi-scale character among others. The weight/NVH (Noise, Vibration, Harshness) and efficiency improvements of gear transmissions will be tackled by introducing new paradigms in the design of housing and components, using new meta-materials and meta-structures, studying the robustness of a given optimization with respect to real manufacturing conditions, developing smart concepts. Numerical simulations and experiments will be carried out to validate the solutions. In addition to the described technical approaches a tight integration of the individual ESRs into the overall research program is taken care of and a specific training plan devoted to their up to date education in gearboxes design and optimization is offered.