Bonding fasteners support students with engineering design

These student challenges are bound by a common goal that focuses strongly on design innovation factors to yield benefits such as improved performance, enhanced fuel economy and increased endurance - which can be largely attributed to adopting aerodynamic lines and lightweighting through composite materials technologies.

The design and manufacture of the composite components and provision for their efficient assembly are often closely comparable to those real-world applications that bigHead encounter on a daily basis - and bigHead is very pleased to help young students solve these challenges.

bigHead´s prominent role for discreet fastening in automotive manufacturing and other industries, and its shared work with research programmes such as the KTP funded project with Cranfield University´s Composites Centre makes it a great partner to help students; not just with products but with full technical support. This support is very much in line with bigHead´s philosophy to work closely with designers from their first ideas and concepts in shared engineer-to-engineer processes.

Projects include the Formula Student and Formula SAE competitions where teams are challenged to build and race a single-seat formula car with marks awarded for a number of different event areas including design, economy and endurance as well as racing and handling. 

In this area, bigHead supports teams from universities in Estonia, Spain, UK and the USA. Another interesting area is solar powered vehicles. The Punch Powertrain Solar Team from the KU Leuven in Belgium and the KJ Somaiya College of Engineering in Mumbai, India are both working towards innovative weight-saving strategies in competitions judged on efficiency and endurance. A project challenge to build and race a one-man human powered submarine at the 2016 European International Submarine Race competition in Gosport, England involved a high degree of composite materials construction helped with bigHead bonding fasteners.

bigHead works closely with composite components manufacturers in automotive, construction, marine, rail and many other industries where carbon fibre, plastics and other formed or moulded structures and components require invisible fixing and where secondary operations such as drilling are to be avoided.

Automotive applications include carbon fibre panel fixing solutions in specialist and luxury car production as well as higher volume car production with the use of robotics and dry adhesive techniques. 

Other areas include marine and boatbuilding, building and construction, and rail and leisure vehicles where both adhesive bonding and directly embedding bigHeads into other types of high volume composite material components is widely used.