“Plastics In Automotive Engineering” Modern Design For Innovative Inlets
Lanxess gets a wealth of opportunities to use its Durethan-branded polyamides and polyesters from the Pocan product range not only in powertrains of electric vehicles but also in charging organization. Potential requests include components for charging plugs, sockets, and stations as well as structural and cover elements in-home charging stations, known as wall boxes “With a tailor-made material mix, we get the right material in the right place. At the same time, a high level of functional integration makes it easy to assemble the entire unit without any nails and using a minimal number of components, which keeps costs low,” by Margraf.
New design for radar sensors
Polyamides and polyesters are also good construction materials for assemblies that form part of driver assistance systems, such as radar sensors. For the latter, HPM has developed a design that allows heat to be dissipated by means of thermally conductive plastics in combination with metallic cooling fundamentals. The sensor components are assembled using integrated snap fits and hot rivets, a process that is much less costly and time-consuming than using screws. Compared with previous methods of building radar sensors, the concept affords a greater degree of freedom in the selection of materials and facilitates the use of tailor-made compounds.
Compound materials for lightweight electric vehicles
The expertise of Lanxess in lightweight design is illustrated by an E/E component carrier for the battery system of an electric vehicle, for example. The carrier boasts a high degree of dynamic strength and rigidity combined with a low weight thanks to the Tepex continuous-fiber-reinforced thermoplastic composites. “Production using the hybrid molding process in a cost-effective process results in a highly integrated structural component that reliably meets the exacting mechanical safety requirements applicable to the battery,” explains Thomas Malek, an expert in lightweight design at HPM. Hollow-profile hybrid technology to be launched on the market. The PIAE congress will also see Hpm present innovations regarding hollow-profile hybrid technology that allows the functionalization of metallic hollow profiles with injection molding compounds. Advantageous properties of the resulting lightweight components include far greater torsional stiffness and strength than components produced using the “traditional” plastic-metal hybrid technology with sheet metal. “In optimizing our technology, we have made a great step forward. For example, the profiles no longer have to be supported against the high pressures of the molten plastic on the inside,” says Dr. Matthias Theunissen, an expert in lightweight design at HPM. “The second phase of the market launch for our new lightweight technology has now begun. We are already working on several customer projects, which are at the prototype stage.”
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