Carbon fiber reinforced plastics (CFRP) have been widely used in aerospace and other industrial application fields because of their high specific strength and high specific modulus. Especially, the strong demand for lightweight materials due to fluctuating oil prices and global-warming problems has been accelerating the application of CFRP to automobile. The authors are now conducting Japanese national project, Automobile Lightweight Structural Elements of CFRP Composites (ALSTECC) program. The purpose of this project is reducing greenhouse gas by developing lighter CFRP automobile bodies. The term of project is from October 2003 to March 2008 for about 5 years. This project is conducted by the funding of Ministry of Economy, Trade and industry to NEDO (New Energy & Industrial Technology Development Organization). Our first target is 50% lightweight that means the reduction of vehicle mass by 200 kg on a 1.5 t vehicle including 400 kg body in white. In addition, improved vehicle safety is of global importance. Therefore, the authors set a second target of 1.5 times energy absorption compared with a steel body. To achieve such an aggressive target, we mainly focused on structural parts that consist of 70% of a total body weight. The structural parts require both stiffness and strength. So they selected continuous fiber CFRP. For achieving these targets, we selected four technical subjects in this project. They achieved these aggressive targets through these subjects.
ALSTECC program: Designing and processing on CFRP automotive structures
ALSTECC-Programm: Entwurf und Verarbeitung von CFK-Automobilbauteilen
2008
7 Seiten, 8 Bilder, 8 Quellen
Aufsatz (Konferenz)
Englisch
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