The kick-off meeting for the Shift2Rail JU funded project, CARBODIN, was held at Fundació EURECAT premises from 11 – 12 December 2019 in Cerdanyola (Barcelona).
CARBODIN (Car Body Shells, Doors and Interiors) is a €3.5 million project led by Fundació EURECAT (Spain) in collaboration with 13 other European partners from seven different countries representing a balanced combination of academia, industry (including Small and Medium-sized Enterprises), associations and research i.e.:
- Ethniko Kentro Erevnas Kai Technologikis Anaptyxis (CERTH), Greece
- Asociación de Investigación Metalúrgica del Noroeste (AIMEN), Spain
- Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen (RWTH), Germany
- Universita Degli Studi di Roma la Sapienza (DICEA), Italy
- Université Polytechnique Hauts-de-France (UPHF), France
- EURNEX, e.V. Germany
- The International Union of Railways (UIC), France
- Vyzkumny Ustav Zeleznicni, AS (VUZ), Czech Republic
- Chinesisch-Deutsches Forschungs- und Entwicklungszentrum
- für Bahn- und Verkehrstechnik Dresden GmbH, (CG RAIL), Germany
- Forster System-Montage-Technik GmbH (SMT), Germany
- MASATS, S.A., Spain
- DES ART Sp. z o.o., Poland
- Composites Aragón, S.L., Spain
The main goal of this 24-month project starting in December 2019 is to develop innovative and affordable solutions for advanced car body shells manufacturing and lightweight material strategies for railways, innovative doors and train modularity, contributing to S2R IP1 strategy. By this, CARBODIN will highly contribute to the next generation of passenger trains that will be lighter and more energy and cost efficient than the current ones.
More specifically, this project will aim at finding solutions for:
Car Body Shells: efforts will focus on the development of smart, automated, modular and cost-efficient mould processes for car body shell manufacturing based on Out of Autoclave (OOA) processes. Besides, the development of structural health monitoring (SHM) systems for car body shell, multi-material and 3D printed parts and tools will help to produce lightweight and high reliability parts.
Doors: efforts will concentrate on the development of manufacturing tools for composites with the aim at cost reduction. Moreover, technologies for improving the comfort at the door neighbourhood will be developed, ensuring thermal and acoustic insulation, and accessibility solutions.
Interiors: solutions will be developed to allow modular and aesthetic interior designs and layouts at low cost and in a short amount of time, to identify new human-machine interactions for the cabin of the future, and to integrate low volt circuits in panels.
The meeting started with an overview of the CARBODIN project given by its coordinator (Víctor García Fernández from Fundació EURECAT) and by Laura Piani, Shift2Rail JU programme manager, who presented the Shift2Rail JU programme and how CARBODIN fits into this context.
All the partners of the consortium then presented their work plan for the next two years. And separate meetings were organised to prepare the work for the coming months.
Several partners of CARBODIN’s complementary project, PIVOT2 (Performance improvement for vehicles on track 2) also attended the Kick-off meeting to present their project and begin to study the synergies between both projects.
This project has received funding from the Shift2Rail JU under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, under Grant Agreement 881814.
