What is Lightweighting?
Lightweighting is the act of reducing product payload/weight via the substitution of heavy/metal components, with lighter, ideally stronger materials such as fibre-reinforced composites, and serves to dramatically reduce product weight and any associated running costs or emissions.
It is a critical industry activity in product assembly verticals today, including consumer electronics, automotive, mass transport, aerospace, or even space. The future survivability for many, in the upcoming EV era depends upon cost-effective deployment of lighter designs.
Put simply, if your product needs to get off the ground (or the planet), or move under its own limited energy supply, then a core focus of current and future design is on weight reduction.
Unfortunately, current lightweighting assembly methods are highly immature and proving to be neither easy, clean, reliable nor cost-effective. Batch wise, uncontrolled, and often labour-intensive, introducing these space-age materials often requires the use of 19th century methods.