Driving sustainability: Specialist bearings slash vehicle emissions
30 June 2023
According to McKinsey & Company’s Lightweight, heavy impact report, the use of lighter materials in the latest aircraft and automobile designs will be essential in reducing the CO2 emissions that these vehicles produce. But lightweighting presents design and cost challenges, as well as sustainability advantages, for manufacturers.
To overcome these challenges, Chris Johnson, Managing Director at SMB Bearings, explains why design engineers should give serious consideration to thin section and stainless steel bearings.
More lightweight designs, relating specifically to the use of lighter materials, have long been a consideration for design engineers. This has particularly applied to aerospace, where, as written in DHM and Posturography, lightweight designs and materials are preferred for aircraft interiors, not only “to reduce weight without compromising passenger comfort, or perhaps even while increasing comfort”, but also to save fuel costs.
The concept of lightweighting isn’t new. But the concept’s wider ramifications for fuel, cost and efficiency savings are pushing it higher up engineers’ priority lists – especially as governments sharply increase their sustainability efforts, including in the use of more advanced manufacturing concepts for reducing CO2 emissions.
Read the full article in DPA's July issue
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