Boosting R&D into lightweight construction
Ambitious climatic goals, electromobility and
changes in consumer behaviour see the automotive industry facing major challenges.
To provide improved support in coping with these toughening challenges to
customers in the automotive industry in future, ENGEL AUSTRIA has founded a
technology centre for lightweight composites at its St. Valentin large-scale machine
production facility.
“Our goal with this lightweight construction centre is to intensify cooperation on developing composite fibre technologies with our partners”, emphasizes Peter Egger, Head of the Technology Centre for Lightweight Composites with Engel in St. Valentin. “The focus is on creating highly-integrated and automated system solutions that guarantee our customers a high degree of efficiency and cost-effectiveness in the production of innovative composite fibre components, thus securing a competitive advantage.”
Lightweight construction and injection moulding have long since been key concepts for meeting the increasing demands of the transport and mobility sectors. Due to their excellent specific characteristics as lightweight materials, plastics are absolutely indispensable, and injection moulding supports both a high degree of component design freedom and reproducible, functionally-integrative, cost- and resource friendly production. ENGEL continually invests in the future market of lightweight construction and has already defined an important milestone with the Engel organomelt process for manufacturing composite fibre components in a single process step, as well as introducing new concepts for in-situ polymerisation.
For many years, Engel has been collaborating closely with research institutes and business partners in the field of lightweight construction. The foundation of the technology centre will serve to extend this network. “The precondition for successful lightweight construction concepts is optimum meshing of the material, the design and the production process. This makes close collaboration with partners along the value added chain particularly important for this future-defining topic”, says Egger.
More information: www.engel.at
