LIGHTBEE - Development of Lightweight Battery Carriers for EV Energy Units
Participants:
BELDIAN WELDING INSTITUTE
BLUWAYS
EKIDE
KAREL KALIP
LAGUN MACHINE TOOLS
LORTEK
TOFAS
YESILOVA HOLDING
Programme:
Sectors:
Automation
Automotive sector
Boiler making and metal processing
Railway
Machine-Tool
Technologies:
Control and Robotics
Materials
Simulation
Friction
Scope
The LightBEE project tackles a crucial challenge: optimizing the battery carrier's design for manufacturability. By integrating key manufacturing technologies, the project aims to create an advanced battery carrier with benefits such as lightweight construction, cost-effectiveness, eco-friendly manufacturing, and enhanced crashworthiness.
The primary goal is to overcome barriers related to designing high added-value battery carrier components. The optimized carrier must be lighter, safer, cost-effective, and environmentally friendly. LightBEE proposes achieving this through:
Lightweight Materials: Utilizing high-strength materials like aluminum extrusions or sheets and composites.
Multi-material Solutions: Implementing diverse materials joined by innovative techniques for lighter and safer battery carriers.
Advanced Joining Techniques: Replacing conventional welding with processes like friction stir welding, friction spot welding, electromagnetic pulse welding, laser welding, and mechanical joining.
This approach ensures a competitive adoption of innovative design methodologies in the transport industry, marking a significant step towards sustainable and efficient electric vehicles.
Solution
The LORTEK technology center, together with the Basque companies Lagun Machine Tools and Ekide, have developed the processes and machinery necessary to weld battery trays using Friction Stir Welding (FSW). This technology avoids the thermal deformations that occur with conventional processes, avoiding subsequent post-processing processes for straightening the pieces. In addition, it offers multiple advantages such as high quality of welded joints ensuring tightness, the possibility of welding currently non-weldable aluminum, the possibility of making dissimilar joints and reduced distortions. Likewise, it is an automatic, repetitive and low energy consumption process. For all these reasons, FSW technology has great potential to respond to the innovations necessary in electric vehicles.
