Toho Tenax, a Teijin-based core company in the carbon fiber and composites business, announced today that it has developed a carbon fiber-reinforced plastic (CFRP), a lightweight multilayer material for fuel cell buses made of aluminum and other lightweight materials Engineered plastic for roofs Roofs with visually appealing surfaces can be manufactured as a bulky piece with a complex shape and are suitable for mass production Roofing Developed using the world's first batch of fuel produced by Toyota Motor Corporation Battery bus.
Hydrogen fuel cell bus caps use a variety of material solutions, including engineering plastics and CFRP.
Faced with the increasingly perfect global environmental law, the automotive industry is developing lightweight body to improve fuel efficiency while maintaining road stability.Because the bus carries a high-pressure hydrogen tank in its superstructure, the lightweight bodywork components on the top of the vehicle are off important.
Toho Tenax partnered with GH Craft Ltd., Teijin's composite structural design, development and evaluation unit, to develop multi-material roofing using Toho Tenax's high-performance carbon fiber and mass-production technology and GH Craft's molding technology.
As a global leader in automotive lightweight composite technology, Continental Automotive Plastics Corporation (CSP) joined Teijin Group in January 2017 as a tier one supplier and solution provider of multi-material components and design to enhance its Global Capacity for Development The Teijin Group looks forward to accelerating the related internal collaboration and strengthening its position as a tier one supplier to the automaker based on the selection of a wide variety of materials for Toyota FC bus roofing.
Thermoplastic carbon fiber composite material
Is expected to contribute to the popularity of a new generation of environmentally friendly thermoplastic carbon fiber composite materials.
The European-centric countries are putting more restrictions on their carbon dioxide emissions and the trend is expected to become more widespread around the world in the future. Therefore, for automobile manufacturers, in order to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and popularize electric vehicles, Technological innovation has become an important topic in the future.
Teijin Group forecasts that a new generation of environmentally friendly vehicles, such as electric vehicles and hybrid vehicles, will further popularize and the demand for carbon fiber composite material (CFRP), which is an alternative material for metals such as iron, will further increase in the context of intensified restrictions on carbon dioxide emissions.
Easy to mass production and recycling of environmentally friendly materials
As a lightweight, high-performance fiber, carbon fiber is ten times stronger than ferrous metal and weighs only one-quarter the weight of ferrous metals, of which CFRP has the advantage of being non-deformable and resistant to acids and bases as a composite of carbon fiber and plastic resin Recently, as a material in the automotive field, it has attracted much attention in environmental protection such as energy saving and carbon dioxide emission reduction.
In the past, CFRP used a heat-harden thermosetting resin to reach the forming time of several minutes to several hours, making it unsuitable for mass production of automobiles.
In response to this situation, Teijin Group, in the process of CFRP molding, the use of heating to soften and cool the hardening of the thermoplastic resin, significantly reducing the forming time, but also the world's first established within 1 minute CFRP Forming mass production technology.
As a result, mass production is possible, production efficiency is increased, the shape of the product after shaping is also changed, and the possibility of product recovery is improved by repeated use and reshaping.
CFRP concept using Teijin technology
At the beginning of 2011, a new concept car made of thermoplastic CFRP was manufactured using the newly developed interim material, forming technology and joining technology. The body frame weighs 47 kg and weighs about 4 times less than previous iron body frames one fifth.