LITEBUS - Modular Lightweight Sandwich Bus Concept
Overview
Background & policy context:
Bus manufacturing is a niche market compared with the car market. It is estimated that there are more than 500 000 buses in circulation in EU countries alone. The bus industry uses extensively welded fabrication, which is labour intensive in nature. In order to stay competitive and maintain employment, bus/rail manufacturers will have to produce more attractive products and reduce production costs, thus new concept designs, materials and assembly methods will have to be developed and applied.
Currently there are no buses/coaches or rail rolling stock in the market using the design concepts and composite sandwich materials developed within the LITEBUS project.
The project aimed to explore the potential benefits offered by integrated composite sandwich material in passenger buses/coaches as a case study for other potential applications in trains, ships, trucks, cars, vans, etc.
The new vehicle concept was benchmarked with current steel vehicles through a life cycle analysis (LCA) in order to implement the new Integrated Product Policy (IPP) principles, leading to a more environmentally friendly vehicle.
Objectives:
The main objectives of the project were:
- to solve the problem of reducing weight and production costs of land transport vehicles through the development of a technology of modular bus/coach construction, using 'all composite' multimaterial sandwich panels instead of a steel/aluminium spaceframe lined with sheets of different materials (metallic or non-metallic);
- to devise design methodologies that decrease production lead time through reducing the number of components and functional integration, and allowing for dismantling, easy repair and recycling;
- to develop high quality urban transport;
- to contribute to the shifting of balance between modes of transport;
- to contribute to improved road safety;
- to contribute to improved quality in the road transport sector.
Methodology:
The work plan was divided into several tasks that cover the development of a novel modular architecture of a bus structure based on composite sandwich materials.
The following aspects were investigated:
- development of new vehicle architecture, based on modularity guidelines;
- study of concepts of sandwich materials available in the market or produced in other EU-funded projects, comparison of their properties with requirements of stiffness, crashworthiness and manufacturability for bus and rail, and study of the possible processing methods and select the most applicable processes for large structural components;
- provision of a validated and safe design technology for joining sandwich panels, fibre-reinforced composite sheets and metallic inserts;
- development of numerical models based on FEM to analyse the static, dynamic and modal behaviour of the body of the vehicle in order to guarantee that the 'all composite body-in-white' of the vehicle has the same flexural and torsional stiffness and modal behaviour of state-of-the-art metallic bodies;
- demonstration of the crashworthiness of the concept vehicle and ensure that the bus structure meets the requirements of the European Directives and regulations (rollover, seat and belt anchorages);
- development of lifetime prediction techniques for the sandwich structural concepts developed in the project;
- production of a design which minimises the total whole-life cost of the vehicle;
- validation of the concepts developed experimentally through the testing of a bodywork cell section.
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