Cars should be environmentally friendly through lightweighting. An important method is to replace metal parts with fiber-plastic composites that have the same stability as metals. A team and partners from the Fraunhofer Institute of Materials and Systems Microstructures in Halle (Saale), Germany, have developed fiber-reinforced plastic composites. These composites not only have very good lightweight properties, but also are based on renewable raw materials. Produced on.
Fiber-plastic composite material is an ideal lightweight structural material, which has high strength, high rigidity, low density, good damping performance and corrosion resistance.
Fraunhofer IMWS has developed bio-based continuous fiber reinforced semi-finished products in a joint research project with BYK Chemie GmbH in Wesel, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, and GK Concept GmbH in Dresden, Germany. These semi-finished products are also known as The UD tape consists of parallel superposed continuous fibers and a polylactic acid-based thermoplastic matrix. The ring fiber reinforced film is formed by adding fibers to the polylactic acid. Stacking and hot pressing a plurality of film layers can produce high performance sheets. When further processing At this point, the fiber orientation in the assembly can be directly adapted to the load in future applications.
Ivonne Jahn, head of the fiber composite semi-finished product group of Fraunhofer IMWS thermoplastics, said that we Combining high quality bio-based fibers with a thermoplastic matrix as the main material to obtain materials with very good mechanical properties For example, bending and tensile properties. Our development work is very good for the application of sustainable lightweight construction. In collaboration with GKC GmbH, they use blending at the Fraunhofer Pilot Plant Center in Schkopau, where they polymerize and process PAZ. Injection molding and pressing methods produce a variety of sample pilot components, such as handrail indicators.
The development of such technologies and materials has laid the foundation for the future use of these biopolymer-based composites in the automotive industry. Ivonne Jahn foresees a variety of possible applications for biological UD tapes: Composite laminates are getting better and better. For example, in the future industrial scale, it is possible to manufacture more economical special parts for automotive interiors. The existing innovations and advanced processes in the factory center, together with new material combinations, increase the potential of lightweight buildings in the future. Matrix composites are indispensable for a new generation of materials.