Grant: Alliance Grants

Canada's automotive industry is the strongest manufacturing subsector in the country, responsible for 12 percent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in the goods-producing sector. The automotive sector landscape is changing, with a major shift towards producing zero-emission electric vehicles (EV) to meet mandated targets of 100% zero-emission vehicle sales by 2035 in Canada and other jurisdictions. However, these vehicles are substantially heavier due to the immense battery mass, thus putting vehicle manufacturers under intense pressure to reduce the mass of EVs to enhance vehicle performance drastically and driving range while simultaneously improving safety, representing a major innovation challenge. The lightweighting market is estimated in the hundreds of billions of dollars across the supply chain of car manufacturers and materials/parts suppliers in different countries, and lightweighting is projected to create hundreds of thousands of new jobs in North American jurisdictions. Incorporating new lightweight materials, such as magnesium alloys, into car structures is a key strategy to achieve up to 30% weight reductions. This Alliance project focuses on developing new numerical frameworks that can accurately account for the physics of deformation (multiscale) of magnesium alloys at various temperatures, strain paths and strain rates, thus accelerating the usage of magnesium alloys for automotive lightweighting. The proposed research will focus on multiscale modelling for developing and testing novel lightweight materials applied to automotive structures and parts, in which Professor Inal has unique research expertise. The industrial partner, General Motors, will employ this research to incorporate magnesium alloys in vehicles to accelerate automotive lightweighting. Furthermore, the proposed research program will contribute to the advanced manufacturing talent pool in Canada's automotive heartland, Ontario.