It's easy enough to manufacture a prototype trailer out of composite materials, but manufacturing it profitably on an industrial scale is a totally different proposition.Jan Verhaeghe describes the development of Composittrailer's technology. A trailer in composite material will be a radical innovation project. Composittrailer carried out trials to change the steel concept gradually towards composite materials. Back in 1994 six such hybrid trailers were made. Each one has now travelled over 1 million km and every year the metal parts are welded. This is a reason why going for trailer in composite material means changing the whole structrure and not just some parts here and there, too. The increasing demand for lightweight trailers and the absence of legal technical obstructions makes this development interesting for the small trailer builder. Knowing that the trailer market represents 300 000 units in North America, 100 000 units in Europe and another 250 000 units in the Far East, it pays off to look into this development. in 2000, Composittrailer started to commercialise a live floor trailer with an empty weight of 6 tonnes. Over the last ten years Composittrailer has built up a unique technology. The need for extrmely strong panels for the side walls of the trailers pushed Compoittrailer's engineers to develop a unique product: the Acrosoma panel. The Acrosoma production machine combines tufting and pultrusion, two reliable and proven techniques, to produce a strong panel at 150 m2 per hour. a foam core is pulled through the entire machine. Composittrailer brought the container chassis weight down from 3500 kg to 2800 kg. Knowing that the axles, tyres and suspension weigh around 2 tonnes, this means that the structure has been brought down ffrom 1500 kg to 800 kg.
Introducing an affordable composite trailer to a conservative market
Reinforced Plastics ; 50 , 5 ; 34-37
2006
4 Seiten, 3 Bilder
Article (Journal)
English
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