Constellium announces results of ALIVE collaborative research project

Constellium announced the results of its collaborative research project ALuminium Intensive Vehicle Enclosures. Constellium’s University Technology Center at Brunel University London was the lead partner of the project focused on developing structural aluminium battery enclosures for electric vehicles. The GBP 15m project, half funded by UK government subsidies through its Advanced Propulsion Center, began in 2020. The consortium, comprised of six industrial partners and two university technology partners, developed novel aluminium battery enclosure designs meeting challenging performance, manufacturing, weight, and cost targets for the project’s OEM partners, BMW and Volvo. The project’s multidisciplinary team investigated and implemented a wide range of joining and forming technologies in combination with Constellium’s family of high-strength and high-crash alloys, Constellium HSA6 and Constellium HCA6, to create high-performance, lightweight, and cost-efficient aluminium designs. The project also enabled the creation of a full-scale battery enclosure prototyping line. Several different 1:1 scale prototypes have been built for a variety of vehicle platforms, passing a range of severe testing requirements such as side pole crash/side impact, bottom intrusion, acceleration, shock, vibration, and leak testing. The team also demonstrated the superior performance of coated aluminium solutions for fire resistance. The battery enclosure designs and associated manufacturing technologies developed as part of the ALIVE project enabled the team to save between 12% to 35% of the weight, depending on the design, compared to existing OEM aluminium and steel designs while meeting or exceeding performance targets. ALIVE also supported the development of cost models to quantify manufacturing costs and minimize capital expenditures to support future industrialization decision-making processes. Given the rapidly evolving EV market, the team had to adapt quickly and develop various technologies supporting OEMs’ structural, non-structural, module-to-pack, and cell-to-pack battery enclosure strategies. Additionally, the consortium proposed a full cradle-to-grave Life Cycle Assessment validated by an external panel, demonstrating the benefit of aluminium solutions over ancillary steel designs.