The following is an excerpt.
The road from research to innovation was on the agenda when representatives from Hydro Aluminium Rolled Products and Extrusion Europe visited CASA.
The visitors were Andrea Toning, Director Program Management Office in Hydro Extrusion Offenburg Germany, Martin Sagen Head of BU General Engineering, Hydro Rolled Products in Grevenbroich Germany and Trond Furu, Research Manager of the Corporate Technology Office in Oslo.
Better than a PowerPoint
«A visit on the sites gives you a better impression and overview than a PowerPoint presentation in the office. It is useful to see the opportunities within the collaboration, the equipment, the test facilities and the knowledge among students and researcher, Trond Furu says.
Before visiting the test facilities, Centre director Magnus Langseth gave a short introduction on SFI CASA. The presentation was strongly linked up to knowledge-based innovation in Norway. Convenient enough, CASA is an abbreviation for Centre for Advanced Structural Analysis.
According to Langseth, the use of such analyses contribute to innovation and change in several ways:
«The use of them lead to smarter and more environmentally friendly structures and products. Reduced time to bring products to the market and reduction of costs are other benefits», he said.
Essentials in Risk Management Analysis
He also pointed out that Advanced Structural Analyses represent an essential element in risk management analysis, for instance, on the consequences of accidents, natural hazards or terrorist acts.
«In the case of a building or another large structure. You need tools to simulate and predict its ability to withstand incidents like this. You cannot physically test a full-size structure».
Langseth outlined the 3 sectors of CASA´s activity, namely physical security, transportation and energy. The partners use the numerical simulations to foresee their capabilities. They all use the same tools, but with different applications.
CASA provides them with the technology, whether it is for the design of cars, structures or installations both on and offshore. Langseth gave some examples from the Impello report on impact and innovations from SFI CASA. One of the use cases in the report shows enormous cost savings on virtual testing of, for instance, cars.
Recycling and Reducing the Carbon Footprint
According to Furu, Hydro see a scope of possibility when it comes to increased use of aluminium in bridges, buildings and other large structures.
«I know CASA well. When considering new opportunities for aluminium, the Centre´s strong competence within simulations, especially towards the automotive and construction industry, is very interesting for us», he says.
The fact that Hydro offers both rolled and extruded products can make the company an attractive supplier of cost-effective solutions and smart combinations of components, according to Furu.
«Besides, recycling and reducing our carbon footprint is high up on the agenda. To be able to design structures based on recycled metals is very important», he says.
The Effort of Industrial Implementation».
One project especially important for Hydro is FractAl. This is a concurrent project to CASA, and could pave the way for an entirely new way to design aluminium structures. Besides building a basic understanding of ductile fracture in aluminium alloys, the researchers work on a modelling framework that enables designers and engineers to select the most suitable alloy for a given structure. This will lead to fewer time-consuming and costly mechanical tests.
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«We put a lot of effort into industrial implementation. At CASA, we spend a lot of time on the issue on how to help the industry to implement our technology», Magnus Langseth told the visitors from partner Hydro.
