Tier Ones show their best at IAA in Frankfurt

Lightweight plastic door modules from Brose, which feature integrated loudspeaker housings, cable and component fixing functions and associated plastic window lifting units, have cut weight by 5kg compared with steel door modules. Around 1kg of this weight-saving comes from a new 60% size reduced Unilatch door latch module.

The long glass fibre reinforced polypropylene (LFT-PP) door modules are able to withstand industry side crash test requirements, despite the walls being just 1.8mm thick. The units are produced in Hallstadt on Brose's ILC Inline Compounding equipment, which is based on a 1,650-tonne Husky Quadloc moulding machine and Leistritz compounding extruder.

Brose also showed two seating concepts involving plastics, which it expects to develop commercially within 4-5 years.

One involves substituting traditional sheet metal car seat pans with an "Organo-Blech" solution (an all-plastic pressed or thermoformed PP part with selective long fibre reinforcement at the sections needing most strength). The other seat concept substitutes a number of interlinked plastic and metal parts with a single lightweight, yet highly flexible, complex moulded plastic part.

Also new from Brose is its Airdate two-piece plastic grid, mounted between the cooling grill and radiator unit, which cuts off air flow when not required. This significantly cuts air resistance at high speed, reducing CO2 emissions by 4g/km.

ElringKlinger showed a "production-ready" plastic car oil sump design, made in a high flow Zytel 70G35 HSLRA4 35% glass fibre reinforced polyamide 6,6 from DuPont.

The plastic sump reduces weight by more than 40% compared to the aluminium alternative. It also incorporates integrated seals, enabling the number of screw tightening points to be reduced from 22 to 11, and integrates filters and magnet supports. The use of plastic also reduces engine noise.

The company also showed a new timing chain cover, produced in plastic and designed for optimised acoustic performance, along with a number of thermoplastics and thermoset cylinder head covers with integrated seals.

The centrepiece of the Johnson Controls Interiors (JCI) stand was its re3 concept car, which features the new "Exposed Natural Material" surface technology on parts of the re3 instrument and door panels.

This involves applying a thin, transparent film to the natural fibre, reinforced plastic interior panel to protect the surface yet allow the natural appearance to show through. A saving up to 30% by weight over conventional laminated solutions is claimed.

JCI also advocates using physically foamed injection moulding instead of compact moulding for main door carriers to save up to 300g. This can also be used for smaller parts such as map pockets.

A novel feature of the re3 is the 96 lithium-ion cells from the JCI/SAFT joint venture business placed between the front seats in the car's tunnel console.

A further JCI development is its inverse forming technology, which has already found its first commercial application in the 5.7-inch TFT display cell of instrument clusters on the new BMW 5-series car. The company says that eliminating local film thinning avoids polarisation and associated optical distortion such as Newtonian ring rainbow effects in this application.

Achim Hosenfeld, JCI vice president electronics says: "The film is placed down into the forming tool. The result is a special embossed surface structure that is imprinted by the texture of the tool. This eliminates the need for an expensive anti-reflective coating and also makes the display easy to read."

Engine component specialist Mann+Hummel (M+H) showed innovative plastics designs for oil filter housings, air inlet manifolds and air ducts, includng the entire air intake system for the Toyota Yaris and IQ models, and an active intake manifold used on the Toyota Avensis car.

The Avensis manifold is made from three vibration welded shells. Laser welding is used to apply the switch unit, ultrasonic welding for the connection bushing, and overmoulding for the metal throttle body grid. M+H plans to produce 170,000 of these manifolds each year at its plant in Sonneberg.

The company will also produce around 100,000 charge air ducts for the diesel versions of the Avensis using a horizontal blow moulding process.

The company says a horizontal tool improves access to the lower mould half so that fastening clamps can be inserted into the mould and bonded to the plastic during blow moulding.

M+H has also developed an all-plastic cost and weight optimised air intake manifold for the Volkswagen common-rail diesel engine, replacing a hybrid design using 35% glass fibre reinforced PA 6.6 and die-cast aluminium. A suite of rotating core injection moulding tools was developed to avoid changing the engine design.

One M+H innovation was missing from its display of commercial components, however. The company's corporate communications manager Joachim Topfer told European Plastics News that the commercial introduction of the company's plastic car oil sump design has been delayed by the present situation in the automotive industry.

"We can therefore only reckon with the start of serial production as from 2010," he says.

Rhodia's automotive vice-president Jean-Claude Steinmetz also referred to plastic oil sump solutions, saying that the company is close to having a "production-ready" project using its high flow polyamide 6,6 grades. He says some of Rhodia's new PA materials have flow properties enabling 60% glass reinforcement to be used as standard, with some able to handle 70%.

With manufacturers required to meet a 120g/km CO2 emission limit from 2012, and with pressure mounting for a 90-95kg/km limit in the future, OEMs will have to get more power from smaller engines. They will also have to cut car weight by around 250kg on average to achieve the most stringent emission limits, Steinmetz says.

Smaller turbocharged engines will raise the temperature in the engine compartment, encouraging a shift to PA from PP as well as from higher performance PPA and PPS resins, which have begun to make inroads into engine compartment applications.

Looking ahead, Steinmetz sees potential for Rhodia's high melt strength PA grades to substitute conventional PE/EVOH barrier multilayer solutions in blow moulded car fuel tanks with single layer PA tanks.

Drivers here favouring PA are requirements set by new fuels and the high cost of EVOH as the barrier material. Steinmetz says it remains to be seen whether PA can be used to produce large complex tank designs, but that it could replace PE/EVOH in some smaller tanks.

JCI's inverse forming process eliminates Newtonian ring effects on the latest BMW 5 series display panel