WP7 – Comfort and Safety Products for Sports of Leisure and Competition

This WP aims to integrate additive manufacturing technologies in the 2-wheel vehicle industry, both in leisure and competitive sports, to enhance improvements in production processes and thus ensure greater competitiveness and efficiency, and also to build, directly or indirectly, disruptive and optimized products for specific needs.

One approach focuses on applying metal additive manufacturing to create metallic components to integrate in 2-wheel vehicles by replacing current components. To this end, digital tools will be applied to optimize mass and maximize performance; additive manufacturing will also be employed, directly or indirectly, through the additional step of polymer overinjection in order to obtain a hybrid product with a plastic coating with a variable finish.

A second approach to this project has to do with the application of polymeric additive manufacturing to improve products. The aim is to combine the versatility of additive manufacturing processes with the use of digital tools to optimize mass and maximize performance. Here, two types of product will be created: (i) polymeric components with mass optimization for high-performance applications, considering that the production process of polymeric components for high-performance applications might consist in the conjoined assembly with other components in order to create a single functional product, 

or it might consist in polymeric overinjection to add specific characteristics to the product, prior to assembly; (ii) polymeric components for applications that require comfort, considering that the production process is executed directly through additive manufacturing and its development will evaluate mass optimization studies, thus optimizing the product’s performance for specific applications, to be defined.

This project it will make it possible to use and apply additive manufacturing technologies in multiple applications that ensure, on the one hand, the improvement of production processes, and on the other, the creation of innovative products with a combination of efficient material and design that will revolutionize existing products in current markets. During the development of the components, strategies will be considered that evaluate the sustainability of the solution even at the end of its useful life. Ultimately, the aim is to evaluate and validate the sustainability of the developed products based on studies that quantify the environmental impacts associated with each product throughout its entire life cycle.