Adhesives for Lightweighting of Structures—Drivers, Selection, Challenges
Lightweighting of structures and combining of materials to take advantage of their best properties is becoming a part of engineering design, and adhesives will play an increasing role in those future designs and applications.
Lightweighting of structures is most often associated with automotive structures. However, lightweighting is a challenge across the transportation sector, including trucks, trailers, buses, passenger rail cars, and even heavy earth-moving equipment and cranes. For cars, lightweighting is focused on improving fuel economy. Most of the load the car moves is the car itself. But in other areas, lightweighting is focused on load-carrying economy (Figure 1). The lighter the structure, the greater the load that can be conveyed at the same overall vehicle weight.