A reused carbon floor for the Alpine A390_β thanks to Lavoisier Composites

If a car like the Alpine A390_β makes you suddenly want to put your foot to the floor, nothing more normal for a car with aerodynamic curves. The car’s floor in question is by no means ordinary. The raw material, produced by the young French company Lavoisier Composites, is carbon from the aeronautical industry.

As each Alpine show car is a unique creation, with parts and components made entirely to measure, the brand has chosen to work with two French suppliers, Lavoisier Composites for the floor and Erpro Group for the headrests and various 3D-printed parts.

A floor with a lighter footprint

Inspired by the Alps mountains, the vehicle uses technical materials found in Formula 1 cockpits. To evoke lightness, the front seat is made of a carbon shell. Although the floor of a vehicle may seem purely functional, Marc Poulain, Chief Advance Designer at Alpine, and his teams wanted to make it an essential element of the A390_β’s interior design, to accentuate the feeling of speed.

It took nine months to manufacture the 360 profiles that make up the vehicle’s floor. Manufacturing processes such as compression moulding made it possible to use materials with a high carbon fibre content to obtain very specific geometries. To achieve the mineral, basalt-effect aesthetic desired by the design team, Lavoisier Composites’ engineers produced a floor made up of a multitude of triangular-section elements, assembled by structural bonding, whose facets reveal the depth of carbon on one side and the brilliance of silicon on the other. ” For the sparkling silicon, we had access to scraps of photovoltaic panels, while the carbon came from the aerospace industry. We then adapted the moulding process to maintain the assembly flexibility required to meet design constraints,” explains Esteban Villalon, co-founder and Chairman of Lavoisier Composites. “The profiles are compression-moulded because they are composed of 2/3 carbon fibre and 1/3 epoxy resin,” continues Mr Villalon.

The company, which is collaborating with Alpine for the first time, is working with the aerospace and photovoltaic industries to make the most of by-product deposits and create innovative composite materials and parts.

In addition to the aesthetic value of the floor, Lavoisier Composites is enabling Alpine to demonstrate the potential of circular materials for the manufacture of structural parts with a small footprint. The Lavoisier Composites floor can be seen at JEC World in Paris Villepinte from 4 to 6 March, booth 6 N 04-16.

Biosourced headrests

The headrests of the Alpine A390_β, also inspired by the world of mountains, appear to be carved from ice. They were 3D printed as a flexible structure housed in a transparent element by additive manufacturing specialist Erpro Group, which has been working with Alpine since 2022.

Produced in a single piece, with a high transparency effect, they had to be light and strong, but also breathable and flexible in the event of impact. Cyrille Vue, head of the company, and his designer, Vincent Rigommier, set out to find the ideal material. Aware that only 3D printing would enable them to produce a headrest perfectly representative of the drawings they had received, they turned to a bio-sourced elastomer, Arkema’s Pebax Rnew, produced in part from castor oil seeds.

They then printed several samples to find the ideal thickness, so that the material appeared very light while retaining its strength and flexibility. It took over three weeks of work to produce the two spectacular headrests, a world first for this type of process in a vehicle.

Photos: Renault Alpine