Ford, Honda, Volkswagen, and Toyota Team Up for Carbon Fiber Research

[Slash]

Apparently, this is so big even King Obama is backing it.

Automakers don’t want to miss the boat on carbon fiber with all its light, high-strength goodness, but they sure don’t want to pay for the entire ship. President Obama seems to understand—and he should, given how he’s set the toughest emissions standards in history—and wants to spur private industry to make this magic material cheaper.

The Department of Energy is handing $70 million of your hard-earned tax dollars to a consortium of 122 companies, labs, universities, and nonprofits that promise to bring a breakthrough or two in composite manufacturing. Ford, Honda, Volkswagen, Toyota, and other partners—all led by the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, which is developing 3D–printed carbon fiber—will pony up the rest of the $180 million during the five-year project. With engineers from Boeing, Lockheed Martin, 3M, General Electric, and other leading companies at the helm, something smart is bound to happen. For automakers, the goal is to replace traditional steel and aluminum parts with carbon fiber so they can begin trimming weight in hidden areas—the kind that contain unsexy parts like tie rods and door latches. Really, no component is off-limits so long as costs come down.

Another publicly funded consortium in Germany, which includes investment by Audi and BMW, is trying to cut carbon-fiber production costs by 90 percent within six years. Ford is already spending $10 million from a separate DOE grant to build and test several composite-filled Fusions that are 800 pounds lighter than stock. Toyota developed its own weaving process for the Lexus LFA supercar and BMW is building carbon-fiber bodies en masse (both companies formed their own carbon bond in 2012).

But pound for pound, carbon fiber costs roughly 20 times as much as steel, mainly because it’s so difficult to form and requires lengthy baking in autoclave ovens. For the nearer and longer term, expect automakers to continue blending various grades of high-strength steel—plus Ford’s new favorite alloy, aluminum—into most everything that’s not a Ford GT.

http://blog.caranddriver.com/fiber-won-ford-honda-vw-and-toyota-team-up-on-carbon-fiber-research/


Thoughts? Right way to go?

 

[YSSMAN]

Less weight = more fun + fuel friendly, so, why not?

If it takes these guys to get the production costs down far enough, all the power to them. That just means that everyone else is going to either have to buy-in, or, develop their own process.

 

[Griffith500]

We need better control over shape, stress distribution and rigidity of the things we make, and being able to make parts out of a material with a high "strength" to weight ratio in more shapes than we previously could, and for less money, is an obvious win in the long run.

There's plenty of work to be done on materials yet, but that's no good if we can't shape those materials how we want them, quickly and efficiently.

Materials and manufacture go hand in hand, and whilst we hear a lot about materials, manufacturing tends to be less in the spotlight, but in some ways it's more important.

 

[catamount39]

Carbon fiber Ford Fiesta RS anyone?

Carbon fiber Ford Mustang.

 

[Slash]

Carbon fiber Ford Mustang.

Already done.

 

[catamount39]

Already done.

Crud how could I forget the GT350R?

 

[Keef]

Thoughts? Right way to go?

CF is the right way to go indeed. It's a wonder material. I'm helping build OSU's FSAE car and we're making the entire chassis out of CF by hand.

The rubber glove industry will also get a boom because making carbon can give you a helluva rash. I don't think I'd itch this bad if I smoked crack.

 

[Griffith500]

CF is the right way to go indeed. It's a wonder material. I'm helping build OSU's FSAE car and we're making the entire chassis out of CF by hand.

The rubber glove industry will also get a boom because making carbon can give you a helluva rash. I don't think I'd itch this bad if I smoked crack.

I would itch like crazy within seconds of just being near the basalt belts on an old rig I used to operate. The rollers would throw the fibres off, so you stood no chance. When the belts broke (which happened all too often) we had to hand-sew them together again (benefits of pilot-scale). It was horrendous.


Anyway, carbon fibre reinforced materials are indeed wonderful, and with better control of the weave, their drawbacks can be minimised. I'm looking forward to non-bulk (or, rather, micro-scale) engineering of variation of material properties. A canonical example is engineering a gradual change in properties in the same material throughout an object, to concentrate certain "properties" where they're needed most. Nature can do it, so let's get to it!