Industry News
Audi engineers among European Inventors of the Year 2008
7th May 2008
The engineers at Audi who developed the company’s aluminium space frame were presented with one of four European Inventor of the Year 2008 awards yesterday. Audi’s team - Norbert Enning, Ulrich Klages, Heinrich Timm, Gundolf Kreis, Alois Feldschmid, Christian Dornberg and Karl Reiter - paved the way for the use of aluminium to render car frames not only lighter and slimmer, but safer too.
Merely substituting steel with aluminium was not an option. Without major design changes, aluminium would have bent at critical weight distribution points. To optimise the distribution of weight, Norbert Enning and his team had to completely re-think the concept of automotive frame design.
In 1993, Audi patented the aluminium car frame system, including methods of mass production. One year later, Audi introduced the world’s first-ever volume-produced car with an all-aluminium body — the Audi A8. Since then, the frame system has been marketed as the Audi Space Frame (ASF).
Direct benefits of the technology include better fuel efficiency, increased road handling, better cornering characteristics and ease of repair. Tests have proven that the frame’s high rigidity also offers better crash protection than steel frames. In terms of durability, aluminium is the only corrosion-free material on the market. With a high degree of pliability, aluminium also offers designers more possibilities for shaping new, more efficient parts.
Since Audi opened up the possibilities of aluminium as car body material, other manufacturers including Jaguar have followed suit, though by no means all Audi’s own cars use the aluminium space frame, for cost reasons.
Enning's invention is best described as a self-supporting frame in which all components such as castings, profiles and panels are part of an integrated weight-bearing system. As each part “carries the other”, the frame achieves maximum stability at minimum mass. Each component fulfils a number of functions, such as supporting other parts or serving as part of numerous cross-sections. As they were designing this intricate system, Enning’s team members realised that the multi-tasking approach required fewer parts — more than 17 percent fewer — than previous frame designs.
News Headlines
