- 4 July 2007 -
Composite car finishes in top three at Le Mans
A COMPOSITE car constructed with the help of Huntsman Advanced Materials recently finished third at the Le Mans 24 Endurance Race. A second car finished in 13th place at the race which was held on 16-17 June.
French motor sports team Pescarolo Sport worked with Huntsman to produce the Pescarolo Judd LMP1 car. All the models for the chassis and bodywork components were CNC milled out of RenShape® BM 5055 epoxy tooling boards. Several layers of carbon fibre were then impregnated with RenGel® SW18 / Ren® HY 2404/HY 5159 epoxy resin system and laid on top of the models, making sure the resulting composite structures were voidless. An autoclave cure was then undertaken at a cure temperature ranging from 60°C to 80°C over a 14-hour period to ensure the composite parts were tough and strong enough for their purpose. The chassis and bodywork composite parts were then bonded together using Araldite® 2014 two component epoxy adhesive and Araldite® 204 one-component foaming adhesive to fill any small gaps between the component parts.
“The physical properties of the BM 5055 tooling board and the RenGel SW15 epoxy resin system proved particularly suitable for his demanding application,” comments Michel Elkoubi of Pescarolo Sport. “BM 5055 is easy to machine with a good surface finish after milling. This enable us to significantly reduce any additional polishing and finishing, so speeding up the entire production process by about 20%.”
Huntsman Advanced Materials; www.huntsman.com
Pescarolo Sport; www.pescarolo.com
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