Fuel efficiency and vehicle crashworthiness are two important issues for modern automotive manufacturing. Current industry standards require aluminum structural components to absorb sufficient crash energy while limiting material microcracking to subcritical fractures. Thus, a successful design for crash-resistant aluminum components must consider microstructural material properties, detailed material failure mechanisms as well as the product and process parameters that determine them. This research projects is a joint research effort between the University and an industrial partner to develop improved manufacturing processes for the production of extruded aluminum components with superior properties for automotive crashworthiness. This collaborative research project has a balance between theory and experiment, and will provide valuable findings for the automotive manufacturing and aluminum manufacturing industries.
