As a leading supplier of high-performance composite materials, Solvay has established a long-term cooperative relationship with Penso, a British auto parts company. A few years ago, the two parties launched a cooperation project called FLAVA, aimed at establishing a composite product supply chain for the automotive industry, providing flexible design, lightweight and high-strength automotive composite products to meet the needs of energy saving and cost reduction.
To achieve such a goal requires the realization of industrial mass production as a prerequisite. "Composite components still account for a relatively small share in the overall automotive industry," said Gérald Perrin, director of automotive market strategy for Solvay's Composites Division. "So we have been looking for a technical route to achieve mass production."
In order to verify the reliability of the new process, Solvay built a fully automated test line at the Heanor plant in the United Kingdom. The results are gratifying: production efficiency has been significantly improved, product quality is stable and defect-free, production processes are highly automated without human intervention, and production time is only It is a fraction of metal parts.
In 2017, the FLAVA project received millions of pounds of financial support from the British government, and at the same time ushered in a new partner, Mercedes-Benz Trucks (UK). "This project fully proves that the large-scale introduction of composite materials into the production of freight vehicles is industrially feasible," Gérald said. "For this reason, we invested a lot of money in product research and development and automation technology research and development. The FLAVA project is our roadmap for industrialization. Stepping stone."
After a few more years, the results of this cooperation project have been seen in the streets of the United Kingdom, and the new van of the British supermarket chain Asda began to be known. Due to the extensive use of carbon fiber and other recycled plastics, its body is 300 kilograms lighter than a standard van. "Its appearance is expected to change the rules of the game in the cargo transportation industry," said Sean Clifton, Asda's senior fleet manager. "This is the result of cooperation between Asda, Mercedes, Penso and all partners."
All this has benefited from the development of composite chemical technology. Researchers have accelerated the process of material polymerization and adopted automated production technology on a large scale, so that the project has the basic conditions for commercial operation. "The composite products provided by Solvay give us design flexibility, allowing us to focus on improving product performance," said Dave Roche, Penso's technical director. "It is worth mentioning that our carbon emissions have also been significantly reduced by optimizing processes and using recycled raw materials."
More importantly, composite materials have extraordinary corrosion and impact resistance, which gives them (10 years) twice the service life of metals (5 years).
Everything is just the beginning. The transportation of goods purchased online is a fast-growing market that has spawned huge demand. For freight vehicles including vans, this means that there are special requirements for their modular production and thermal insulation performance. They need to have the ability to transport refrigerated goods and normal temperature goods at the same time.
Composite materials perfectly match the above requirements, while reducing vehicle weight, improving vehicle design flexibility, and increasing truck capacity by at least 30%. "Combined with advanced aerodynamic design, fuel consumption and carbon emissions will be greatly reduced. Even under the impact of the new crown epidemic, we are still able to bring this innovative vehicle to the market within this year, which is extremely gratifying." Sean added.
With this, Solvay and its partners were able to prove that the industrial mass production of composite parts is feasible not only from a technical point of view, but also from a commercial point of view. Penso's fully automated truck assembly plant will also be put into saturation production in 2020.
There is no doubt that the use of composite materials in the freight car industry will achieve rapid growth. "This market has just opened to us, and we will also replicate it to other markets, such as large-scale automobile production and the aviation industry," Gérald said. At present, the company has signed technical cooperation agreements with major customers in the above-mentioned fields, and visits to the Heanor factory will also start in the first half of 2020.
As a relatively conservative industry, innovation in the aviation field has been relatively slow, but it has also been drawing inspiration from the technological development of the automotive industry. "The technology and chemical processes we developed from the FLAVA project have been fully verified." Gérald concluded. "These technologies and processes are ready for industrial transfer."