New research project aims to boost electric vehicle performance

A new research project, Tucana, will focus on lightweighting technology with the help of experts from the Warwick Manufacturing Group (WMG, Coventry, UK), a department at the University of Warwick focused on research in engineering, manufacturing and technology.

The research will develop scalable carbon fiber composite solutions with the goal of boosting the performance of electric vehicles. As part of the project, WMG will manufacture carbon fiber components, in their new Materials Engineering Centre which has dedicated facilities for composite and hybrid structures. To gather the material optimization and characterization, WMG will trial the manufactured materials on its newly installed composite materials processing equipment (which received £1.3m funding from the WMG centre High Value Manufacturing Catapult). WMG will receive £4m, of £18.7m in government funding through the Advanced Propulsion Centre (APC, Coventry, UK).

Tucana, brings together a consortium of world-leading academic and industry partners. Led by Jaguar Land Rover (Coventry, UK), other partners in the project are Expert Tooling & Automation Ltd. (Coventry, UK), Broetje-Automation UK Ltd. (Chester, UK), Toray International UK Ltd. (London, UK), CCP Gransden Ltd. (Newtownards, UK), and Magna Exteriors Ltd. (Banbury, UK).

The goal of Project Tucana is to allow the true environmental credentials of electric vehicles to be realized by enabling wider adoption. The CO₂ benefit of the project between 2023-2032, is projected at 4.5 million tonnes.