A neat picture from the Company but unrelated
This is obviously a major improvement in composite manufacture
although limited to specific low viscosity monomers. This will be
quickly taken up by industry and we will see a huge drop in component
cost in all consumer manufacturing.
This will actually have significant impact on corporate bottom lines
and tracking first adopters is worth while because of the huge
production runs possible.
Superior plumbing may come out of this in time. There are plenty of
obvious markets not tackled by composites yet because of costs.
Imagine injection molding a million bathtubs with a few bucks of
materials? I suspect that you can get the point. Plastic by itself
was never good enough and fiberglass took labor.
Composites for large-scale manufacturing
Research News Dec
03, 2012
Continuous
fiber-reinforced composites with thermoplastic matrix resins are very
well suited for use in automotive manufacturing. However, to
manufacture them is complicated. A new approach now makes it
possible to use the injection molding process.
To date, it has been
very laborious to manufacture fiber-reinforced composites with a
thermoplastic matrix in large quantities. On the one hand, the
textile-like dense continuous fiber-reinforced structures are
difficult to shape, on the other, joining the continuous fibers with
a highly viscous thermoplastic matrix material is a highly complex
process. To date, there is no economically profitable production
technology for large-volume component series.
Adapted injection
molding process
Together with the
injection molding machine manufacturer ENGEL Austria GmbH, the
scientists of the Fraunhofer Institute for Chemical Technology ICT in
Pfinztal (Germany) have, for the first time, brought a technology to
production readiness that allows the series production of such
continuous fiber-reinforced thermoplastic composites with an
injection molding process. So far, it has only been possible to use
the injection molding process for fiber-reinforced composites made of
short fibers or long fibers. “Continuous fiber-reinforced composite
structures with a thermoplastic matrix are becoming increasingly
popular, and will be used increasingly in the automotive industry”,
states Dr.-Ing. Lars Fredrik Berg, scientist and project manager at
the ICT. “With the injection molding process, components that
have high fiber contents by volume and therefore outstanding
mechanical characteristics can be produced efficiently in high volume
series”.
Based on the results
of their own research, the scientists of the ICT developed, together
with ENGEL, a prototype machine for injection molding. The ENGEL
e-victory 120 can handle all the necessary working steps in a single
machine. The reactive components are prepared and mixed, and the
material is injected into the molding die. The in-situ
polymerization also takes place in it, after the textile
reinforcement structures have been introduced. “The ICT and
ENGEL have developed a robust, compact and fully automated
technological system to series readiness that is flexible and quick
at the same time. It is exactly this technology that the automotive
industry has been lacking for continuous fiber-reinforced
thermoplastic composite structures. The process, which to date had
been distributed across several machines, can now be carried out on a
single one”, says Dipl.-Ing. Peter Egger, Head of the Technology
Center for Lightweight Composites at ENGEL. e-victory has already
passed its first crucial test: Engel produced, as an example, a brake
pedal insert made of fiber glass-reinforced polyamide for the
automotive supplier ZF Friedrichshafen.
Endless
fiber structures wetted out ideally
In contrast to the
injection molding processes for fiber composite materials to date,
where only short fibers could be processed, continuous
fiber-reinforced composite structures can be fed into the e-victory
and be impregnated with a very low viscosity plastics matrix. “We
have developed a process in which the in-situ polymerization of
thermoplastic matrix materials works. We allow monomers, which are
highly reactive molecules, to polymerize directly in the machine. The
monomers have a shorter molecule chain than polymers, and therefore a
lower viscosity. When being processed, the viscosity of the reactive
plastics matrix is similar to that of water. This means that the
fiber structures can be wetted down in an ideal manner, without
displacing the structures in the form”, explains Berg. In October
the Reinforced Plastics Industrial Association AVK awarded the ICT
and ENGEL an AVK Innovation Prize in the “Processes” category for
this new technology.
Fraunhofer_
ICT_Composites for large-scale manufacturing.zip [ ZIP
0,07 MB ]
Research News
December 2012 Complete Issue [ PDF 0,43 MB ]
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