Flexcrash

Flexcrash aims to develop a flexible and hybrid manufacturing technology to enhance weight reduction and crash resistance by locally reinforcing the critical areas for a crash event, creating structures that are safer and lighter compared to current solutions. 

The project promotes a wide usage of the advanced materials and manufacturing solutions to build a new generation of crash-tolerant structures with outstanding performance under a wide range of impact angles and unexpected crash conditions.  

Frontal crashes accounts for the 70% of total car collisions. Therefore, Flexcrash solutions are focused on a front-end structure.  However, these solutions can be transferred to a wide range of safety-related structures in other locations of the vehicles where the risk of passenger’s injuries is high.  

Flexcrash’s technology contributes to directly reduce the fatalities risks in road crashes, but also reducing CO₂ emissions coming from the direct contribution of the lightweighting of car body parts, and from the simplification of the entire supply chain. 

Consortium as a whole

Flexcrash is a collaborative project with a multidisciplinary team with different capacities and knowledge in disciplines ranging from advanced characterisation, lightweighting, materials performance, advanced testing and modelling, hybrid manufacturing, traffic simulation and standardisation.  

The consortium of the Flexcrash project, coordinated by Eurecat Technology Centre, is formed by 10 partners from 5 European countries.  

Our role

Direct Energy Deposition (DED) technologies can be exploited in a hybrid approach in combination with lower cost manufacturing technologies. In particular, it can be used to deposit materials on a substrate only where needed adopting a new design paradigm based on adding-value functional feature (AVFF). AVFFs are small-scale 3D geometric features deposited on a preformed substrate, giving it one or more additional functionalities. With the possibility to add local features to a single part, the AVFF approach will enable hybrid manufacturing strategies to replace the current production methods. Within Flexcrash, Gemmate Technologies contributes to develop design concept for hybrid manufacturing, conceiving lightweight components for automotive application. As a follow up of the results achieved in SAMOA, Gemmate works on the development of AVFFs with optimal crash resistance, trough intensive experimental and modelling work.

With the goal of enhancing the mechanical performance of existing parts, attention should shift to the deposited material substrate interaction and how the process itself damages or deforms the substrate. For this purpose, both the coupling of thermal and mechanical simulation is fundamental, as well as building a computationally efficient simulations framework for larger components. A numerical model for the simulation of the DED process is defined to reproduce the geometrical characteristics of the deposited tracks and to evaluate the mechanical stress and deformations induced in the substrate at the end of the deposition process. The model is implemented using the finite element method software COMSOL Multiphysics®.

Scientific publication

Characterization and simulation of AlSi10Mg reinforcement structures by direct energy deposition by means of laser beam and powder, J. Laser Appl. 36, 042058 (2024); doi: 10.2351/7.0001416