Automotive Plastic Components Injection Molding
Description
High automotive performance demands parts that handle it all. Plastics perform from the engine to the chassis; throughout the interior to the exterior. Today’s automotive plastics make up approximately 50% of the volume of a new light vehicle but less than 10% of its weight.
Safety advances in today’s materials save countless lives. Air bags, windshields, sunroofs plus energy absorbing innovations reduce vehicle fatalities. Plastic front-end modules, modular seats and energy-absorbing bumpers help save lives every year.
Plastic composite structures can help lightweight vehicles while preserving safety features. When a vehicle crashes, engineers want the structure to crush in a predictable way. Automotive materials should absorb, not transfer, the “impact energy” to humans. The industry calls this a “controlled crush.”
Fiber-reinforced polymer composites absorb four times the crush energy of steel. The B-pillar is the support post that connects a vehicle’s roof to its body. It is at the rear of the front door and provides the major source of resistance to intrusion during a collision.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration recently funded a study on B-pillars. The study looked specifically at a composite intensive carbon fiber thermoplastic B-pillar design. The goal was to determine the design’s weight savings and vehicle crash safety as compared to a metallic baseline. The B-pillar showed 60 percent weight savings, and satisfied side-impact crash requirements. Computational tools modeled the dynamic impact and crush response B-pillars.
Plastics are helping save lives during pedestrian impacts too. Polycarbonate-blend bumpers help protect passengers in collisions. Plastics also enable faster deployment for greater pedestrian protection in Ford vehicles. A flexible pedestrian-protection crash direct-mounted sensor bracket injection molded in plastic. See more in our “Crumple Zone Blog” and our tour of the BMW i3 Carbon Fiber Chassis Safety Components.
Once the plastic has solidified, the mold opens, and the automotive component is ejected. The part is inspected for quality, including checking for any defects, dimensional accuracy, and surface finish. If required, secondary operations such as trimming, welding, or surface treatment may be performed to achieve the desired final product.
Automotive plastic components injection molding offers several advantages. It allows for the production of lightweight parts, contributing to overall vehicle weight reduction and improved fuel efficiency. Injection molding also provides high production rates, enabling the manufacture of large quantities of components in a short time.
Furthermore, injection molding allows for the creation of intricate designs and complex features, such as undercuts, threads, and inserts, which may be challenging or impossible to achieve with other manufacturing processes. The ability to integrate multiple functions into a single molded component helps simplify assembly processes and reduce costs.
Read more: https://www.djmolding.com/automotive-plastic-components-injection-molding/
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