Project Summary
RIGHTWEIGHT - Novel advanced materials solutions for affordable lightweight to meet automotive and aerospace makers’ needs
Applying lightweight solutions is the most efficient approach to make transport greener (Lucintel’18; McK’12). However, SME suppliers of automotive and aerospace parts in NWE encounter severe challenges to define optimal lightweighting: automotive struggles to integrate the most advanced materials; aerospace, to reach acceptable costs and production speeds. Each sector uniquely excels in specific areas: e.g. automotive leads automated mass manufacturing and aerospace, materials performance. To effectively adopt feasible lightweight solutions, more affordable and environmentally-friendly innovations must be co-developed across the value chain: market-pull from demand side will stimulate a competitiveness increase of supplier SMEs, while contributing to reduce overall CO2 transport emissions.
Expectations
RIGHTWEIGHT will support 50+ manufacturing SMEs in automotive and aerospace value chains to deliver components meeting car/aircraft makers’ needs. 20+ novel lightweight products will be incubated to TRL7 by 2022, improving environmental performance and greater value-for-money via an open cross-sectorial process combining educational activities and transnational thematic competitions in 5 cross-cutting areas within lightweight:
- Materials supply & development
- Characterization & modelling
- Design & smart functions
- Manufacturing & assembly
- Recycling
Partners will provide dedicated training in specialised complementary fieldlabs.
5 countries with automotive and aerospace relevance (RIS3) will be involved, leveraging leader-follower synergies: FR (aero), DE and BE (auto), NL (both) and IT (strong in both). 50+ end-users (large demand actors) from 7 regions are already committed (assoc. part.).
RIGHTWEIGHT will pioneer to stimulate cross-sectorial transfer between actors now operating in one value chain with dedicated transnational sessions (also inviting peer projects) and a novel database of success cases.
We will anchor €10M turnover & 100 jobs in NWE, while generating €2M turnover & 50 jobs by 2022.
Objectives of RIGHTWEIGHT
The overall objective of RIGHTWEIGHT is to increase the competitiveness of automotive and aerospace SMEs delivering new solutions that meet environmental and affordability targets. Cross-sectoral collaboration and dedicated support will help them increase capacity to co-develop solutions meeting car/aircraft makers’ needs. RIGHTWEIGHT will set up a transnational ecosystem connecting 7 partner regions with complementary expertise (FR aero, DE & BE auto; NL & IT both), to be expanded with 3 additional NWE regions (LU, IE, UK).
Cross-cutting areas within lightweight: