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Faurecia wins JEC 2015 Innovation Award for semi-products

17 Mar '15

2 min read

Faurecia, one of the world’s largest automotive equipment suppliers, has won the JEC Europe 2015 Innovation Award in the semi-products category for Flaxpreg, a green and light very long flax fibre reinforced composite sandwich.

Flaxpreg can be applied by automakers as a multi-position trunk load floor or a structural floor in the passenger compartment of a vehicle. The use of unidirectional long non–woven flax fibres as reinforcement is the key innovation allowing a drastic weight reduction.

With very low density, Flaxpreg offers excellent mechanical properties allowing for a 35% weight reduction compared to traditional petro-based glass mat, polyurethane sandwich solutions, Faurecia said in a statement.

The Flaxpreg project, developed by Faurecia with support from PSA Peugeot-Citröen, Lineo, and the University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne (France), started in 2011.

The first part of the Flaxpreg project consisted in developing a uniform and easy to handle flax tape, directly produced from flax ribbons, the raw material of the traditional spinning, thus avoiding the patented weaving step.

The second part dealt filling of the acrylic resin directly in line in order to produce a pre-impregnated material known as prepreg. The third step consisted in developing the Flaxpreg sandwich construction using a paper honeycomb structure with cycle times under two minutes per part.

Arnaud Duval, acoustics innovation manager at Faurecia Interior Systems said, “The originality of the Flaxpreg sandwich lies in the suppression of the spinning and weaving step, which first goal is to drastically reduce the production cost of the non-woven FlaxTape. It also offers superior mechanical properties thanks to perfectly in-plane aligned and non-twisted reinforcement fibres, which results in significant weight reduction.”

Faurecia plans to address automakers for the structural trunk load floor market typically dominated by more traditional materials with Flaxpreg. Further applications such as package trays, door trims, or seat backrests are currently under investigation. The first series applications of Flaxpreg are expected to reach market in 2018 for European automakers. (GK)

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