SALIENT

The SALIENT consortium is led by the Automotive Technology Centre of Galicia (CTAG), Spain as general coordinator and the University of Northumbria at Newcastle, United Kingdom as scientific coordinator. The 36-month project will run from September 2022 until August 2025 and focuses on proposing and validating lightweight, adaptive and sustainable structural vehicle design concepts with a safer and more sustainable lifespan and a more adaptive FES design. SALIENT groups 12 consortium partners across 7 countries (Spain, Italy, Germany, Austria, Turkey, Estonia and the United Kingdom).

SALIENT will present novel structural and vehicle FES (Front End Structure) concepts that are safer, lighter, circular and even smart, which can be adapted in order to improve crashworthiness in different crash scenarios. It will consider relevant factors for vehicle design, including the analysis of crash scenarios including the simulation of collisions in mixed traffic and compatibility context, the development of better adapted materials and improved manufacturing techniques and validation, will be considered throughout all steps. This will also take into account socio-economic challenges, increasing levels of automation and heavy weight vehicles sharing the road. As a goal, SALIENT tackles four main aspects to improve vehicle design: i) safety, ii) weight, iii) circularity, and iv) adaptability (smart concepts).

The project aims to improve a reference vehicle with significant reductions in terms of weight (max. 196kg), energy consumption (-1.84 kWh/100km) and CO2 emissions (max. 790g/100km). Furthermore, the costs and energy required for vehicle production would be rendered more economical and sustainable as well: cost for raw materials to be reduced by up to a 22% and time for manufacturing and scrap rates by up to a 20%.

The very first consortium meeting to inaugurate the project took place on 20-21 September 2022 at the CTAG headquarters in O Porriño, Spain; it offered a first opportunity for the project partners to set an ambitious work plan for the immediate next 12 months as well as an outline of the entire body of work to be performed during the project’s lifespan.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2022 Research and Innovation Programme under Grant Agreement number 10047227.