Electric mobility will drive a new era of durability testing. New material concepts and structural approaches will be necessary to fulfill the demand for range, energy, and cost efficiency.
Hybrid materials will combine characteristics of today’s alloys, composites, and others, eventually generating features that might seem contradictory today, e.g., low viscosity and high-tensile metal matrix structure in a single material. Morphing materials will help create adaptive structures on a microscopic as well as macroscopic scale. Inspired by the endless creativity of nature, new levels of stiffness, aerodynamics, and so on will be accomplished.
Additive manufacturing is changing the mindset of a whole generation of engineers from "function follows form" to "form follows function." Equal or superior performance is achieved with only a fraction of the material input otherwise required. The complex and highly anisotropic composition of these materials and structures as well as the new manufacturing methods will require extensive simulation and testing to ensure durability.
Make sure to choose the best partner to help your engineers face these challenges, starting with the acquisition of real load data to serve as input for your test. Transfer these insights to the first prototype by choosing the right strain gauges and data acquisition hardware and software in order to acquire solid data. This is HBM's DNA.