According to foreign media reports, researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) are developing a predictive software tool designed to predict the material structure and reduce the production cost of carbon fiber materials.
A number of car prices are actively committed to improving the vehicle's fuel economy.According to the US Department of Energy, lightweight may be a viable way.If the car to reduce 10%, the vehicle's fuel economy can improve 6% -8% .
Carbon fiber is undoubtedly the most promising lightweight material, many car companies hope to use it instead of automotive steel.Compared to traditional materials, carbon fiber not only light weight, but also provide a higher degree of design freedom, to create a variety of appearance and structure.
However, there are still many challenges with carbon fiber composites, and Dr. Leonard Fifield, PNNL's materials scientist and research group, is working on a predictable engineering design tool that will be used to design new lightweight, economical automotive composites.
The R & D team brought together professionals from Toyota, PlastiComp, Autodesk, University of Illinois, Purdue University, Virginia Tech, etc. The team created a number of software tools to successfully predict the fiber orientation of complex carbon fiber thermoplastic components (fiber orientation) and length distribution (length distribution).
The tool allows car companies and component designers to more quickly experience and explore new product design concepts.The researchers compared the predictions of properties of molded carbon fiber materials with those of molded fibers in simulation software, Thus verifying the accuracy of the software and the modeling.They found that the software had a very high predictive value for the fiber length distribution and a predictive accuracy of up to 88% for the fiber orientation.
PNNL found that carbon fiber reinforced polymer composite technology can either reduce body weight by more than 20%, however, compared to steel, the material costs more than 10 times the cost of the former.
Researchers are currently working to reduce carbon fiber costs, thereby reducing production cycles and reducing the production costs of carbon fiber reinforced polymer-based composites, which could result in the future use of automotive carbon fiber materials if such predictive software is to be adopted or substantially lower manufacturing costs In addition, researchers also need to enhance the performance of predictive software tools.
