JEC COMPOSITES MAGAZINE - Issue #85 - November/December 2013 - 27

Fig. 10: Brake pedal demonstrator
(© Lanxess)

oped in partnership with
Lanxess/Bond Laminates,
Engel, Kappa and Piovan.
The pedal weighs 30% less
than its metal equivalent.
- Takata-Petri's car airbag
housing, developed in
partnership with Bond-Laminates, KraussMaffei and
Christian Karl Siebenwurst
(Figure 11) using equivalent
materials with equivalent
advantages.

Fig. 11: Car airbag housing demonstrator (© Takata)

Material suppliers
For raw materials, companies like BASF, Borealis,
DSM, DuPont, Lanxess/
Bond Laminates, Quadrant
Plastics Composite, Solvay/
Rhodia, Aonix Advanced
Materials, and Tencate are
clearly positioned in organosheet overmoulding technology and have cornered
projects for automotive applications - with Bond Laminates leading, followed by
BASF. Table 1 is an attempt
to identify all the players
involved, including those
already with some activities,
like Celanese (with local UD
reinforcements), and those
which could convert to the
technology. There are a lot

of thermoplastic prepreg
suppliers. It is worthy of
note that polyamide and, to
a lesser extent, polypropylene are natural choices in
automotive, thanks to their
good cost/properties ratio.
Of course, you will notice
that the materials mentioned in the Table 1 give
it a broader scope than just
the automotive sector. While
this article focuses on automotive, we need to keep the
other sectors in mind as well.
With its 100% buyout of
Bond Laminates in September 2012, German company
Lanxess is currently one
of the most visible players
in this technological field.
Lanxess used to promote
metal/plastic hybrids and is
now promoting composite/
composite (or composite/
plastic) hybrids. As a side
note, the brand-name's
Tepex® organo-sheets were
created in the 1990s in DuPont's research laboratories.
Two materials experts who
played a key role in the development process acquired
the commercial and technological rights in 1997. In
2000, Centrotec Sustainable
AG acquired a stake in Bond
Laminates. Following a
number of joint automotive
projects, Lanxess decided
to buy out Bond Laminates.
Today, DuPont is returning
to the market that it gave up
before. Last October, Bond
Laminates announced a
75% increase in its production capacity at its Brilon
site in Germany, slated for
summer 2014: proof, if any
were required, of rising sales
volumes.
In another recent move
among companies, Solvay

also made an October announcement that it has
signed an agreement with
Aonix Advanced Materials,
based in Ottawa, Ontario,
Canada. Solvay intends to
team up with Aonix to accelerate the development
and commercialization of
mass-produced thermoplastic composites based on
Solvay's high-performance
polymers in the mobile
electronics, automotive, oil
& gas, and sports equipment markets. Aonix has
developed proprietary resin
formulations and is proposing turnkey solutions,
including the development
of production lines, to part
manufacturers. Aonix has
just announced the creation
of a subsidiary in Taichung
City, Taiwan to provide electronic and sports equipment
solutions. Taiwan is precisely
a key location for these two
sectors.

Equipment & engineering
As for injection machinery,
specialists Arburg, Engel
and KraussMaffei (with its
FiberForm® technology) are
establishing what could be
called a veritable evolution
in plastics processing, and
are participating in most of
the projects. For moulds and
plastics-processing equipment, there are companies
like Christian Karl Siebenwurst, Compose, DMM,
Georg Kaufmann Formenbau (LIPA Series), Glittenberg, INCOE, Maier Formenbau, Motan-Colortronic,
Piovan, RocTool (induction
heating system) and Wirth
Werkzeugbau, among others.
There are just as many players involved in thermoform-

No85 November - December 2013 /

ing, presses and innovation,
e.g. AHP Merkle, Aonix
Advanced Materials, ASE
Industrieautomation, Barth,
Bielomatik Leuze, FPT Robotik, Frimo, HBW-Gubesch
( Jacob Composites, SpriForm®), Kappa, Kuka,
ONI-Wärmetrafo, Pinette
Emidecau, Schaumform
Engineering Services and
Stäubli Tec-Systems.
This is also the case for
laboratories and engineering companies, e.g. Cemcat,
Cetim, eTAC, Fraunhofer
ICT, Institut für Leichtbau
und Kunststoff-technik (TU
Dresden), IRT Jules Vernes,
IRT M2P, LKT (Lehrstuhl
für Kunststoff Technik,
Erlangen University), Neue
Materialien Fürth, Onera
(French national Space
Laboratory), PPE, RWTH
Aachen (Institut für Kunststoffverarbeitung) and TPRC.

Conclusion
The technology has a lot of
potential and inspires a lot of
enthusiasm. The field of its
industrial-scale applications
as means of mass production
has barely opened up, so it
is still difficult to put figures
on future volumes, but they
should be quite considerable. As usual, other materials
are also undergoing innovation, and this technology
could have other competitors in metals, in particular
with the new steels, or in
composites with the thermoplastic RTM process, using
in situ polymerization, or
with UD reinforcement layup on injected parts. n
More information:
www.jeccomposites.com
Contact:
glowacz@jeccomposites.com

jec composites magazine 27

http://www.jeccomposites.com

JEC COMPOSITES MAGAZINE - Issue #85 - November/December 2013

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of JEC COMPOSITES MAGAZINE - Issue #85 - November/December 2013