Technical, economical and environmental feasibility of PU resin composites for automotive applications

Abstract

Composite materials are predicted to be the future for high volume automotive applications because of the following advantages: they replace multiple steel parts into one composite moulding; tooling costs are reduced at lower production volumes, allowing styling freedom and weight reduction. Composites used in high volume automotive applications are mostly in semistructural and non-structural parts using low fibre volume fraction and random architecture. Future use of more advanced composites (composites aligned reinforcement in high fibre volume fraction) would enable to reach superior specific properties compared to metallic materials, resulting in substantial weight savings. The present work focuses on a comparison of epoxy that is used, today, for automotive applications to a new Polyurethane (PU) developed by Huntsman for HIVOCOMP project to make such structural composites. The main aim of the HIVOCOMP project is to get a material which allows weight reduction compared with the actual materials that are used in automotive applications, mainly metals, with a competitive price, to get it HUNSTMAN has developed a resin which allows faster cured time than epoxy, that means the decrease of the price using the PU instead of Epoxy.