Lanxess says that it has become a premium sponsor of, and has supplied materials to, a racing team from Cologne University in its bid to win Formula Student – a design competition which has more than 900 universities worldwide taking part.
‘Autonomous driving, e-mobility, and new infrastructure concepts are changing the automotive landscape – and with it the plastics industry. By 2025, around 80% of all vehicles produced worldwide will have alternative drives,’ said Jan Bender, head of marketing for EMEA in the Lanxess High Performance Materials (HPM) business unit. ‘We develop high performance plastics for lightweight applications for every area of the automobile. In addition to body elements, plastics are replacing traditional steel structures in the chassis and drive system,’ Bender explains.
According to Bender the principle is comparable to that of the human skeleton, whereby the fibers in the composite materials provide the necessary stability to the plastics under stress. This makes it possible to produce plastic components in areas where the material was previously considered unsuitable. Even highly stressed brake pedals can now be made from glass fiber-reinforced plastic, which can reduce the weight of the pedal by more than 40%.
This story uses material from Lanxess,with editorial changes made by Materials Today. The views expressed in this article do not necessarily represent those of Elsevier.
