FATECO project funded

FATECO project funded

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FATECO, Improvement of the fatigue performance of automotive components through innovative ecofriendly finishing operations has been funded by the European Commission, within the financial aid call of Research Fund Coal and Steel (RFCS-2018), with 847284 reference .

 

 

Description

FATECO project is aimed at improving the fatigue and tribological performance of automotive components by optimizing the surface integrity (SI) of these components by new eco-friendly finishing operations. The EU is committed to reducing the number of traffic accident victims, as shows the adoption of the proposal in May of 2018. For that purpose, the probability of accidents to be occurred must be reduced. Taking into account that one of the main causes for vehicle accidents is component failure, the likelihood of piece failures must be minimised. In particular, the FATECO project will be focused on two of the main transmission pieces (shafts and gears of the gearboxes) since more than 25% of the component failures in vehicles are related to transmission parts.

Transmission components must have a good fatigue and tribological performance if we want to ensure their correct behaviour in their service-life. Shafts and gears are subjected to torsional, bending and biaxial loads, gears support tooth bending loads and pitting [4]. The maximum stress level caused by these loads is reached at the component surface [5], and therefore the properties of the surface of the component have a great effect on its in-service performance. Shaft and gears work in sliding contact with counterpart transmission components and consequently they must show a good tribological behaviour (low wear and friction). It is widely known that principally surface texture affects the tribological behaviour.

Beyond this context, the FATECO project will analyse the effect of conventional and innovative finishing process on SI (microstructural damage, surface residual stresses, surface topography) and its relationship with fatigue and tribological performance. This will allow to identify manufacturing processes that improve the final in-service performance of the components.

Although during the last years finishing operations alternative to the conventional grinding have been developed, their industrial implementation has not been completely faced yet. These promising finishing operations are expected to improve the component surface integrity (SI). Additionally, most of them can be conducted without lubricant or with a minimum quantity (MQL) resulting in a manufacturing process more eco-friendly than the actual one, in which high amounts of lubricant are used.

Interestingly, a machine learning approach (based on artificial neural networks (ANN) or similar approaches (J48, Support Vector Machines (SVM) and Support Vector Regressor, Random Forest Classificator and Random Forest Regressor, etc.) together with the data generated in the project) able to predict the SI and the fatigue and tribological behaviour of the components, avoiding very expensive and time consuming tests, will be developed along the FATECO project.

Objectives

The main objectives of the project are:

• The enhancement of the automotive components safety (minimising the number of fatal accidents) by means of an improved fatigue and tribological performance. This performance improvement will be achieved through the optimization of the component SI by new finishing operations.
• Development of a machine learning system able to estimate the SI and the fatigue strength and tribological behaviour of the considered components (shafts and gears) depending on material properties and process parameters.

Complementary to these main goals the following secondary objective is also addressed:

• Complete removal of the lubricant in some of the new finishing operations without affecting the fatigue and tribological performance of the component. Thus, the manufacturing process will be 100% eco-friendly.

 

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