PRODUCT NEWS
INNOVATIVE TECHNOLOGY
WILLIAMS ADVANCED ENGINEERING
WILLIAMS ADVANCED ENGINEERING SETS
OUT NEW APPROACH TO USE OF CARBON
COMPOSITE STRUCTURES
Williams Advanced Engineering has
published a White Paper to showcase its
proprietary, patent-pending innovations
in carbon composites and the benefits
they offer to the automotive industry and
beyond. The company has developed a pair
of innovative technologies that promise a
step-change in the affordability of composite
materials.
Known as 223™ and Racetrak™, these
technologies offer comparable performance
to existing composites solutions, but
with a range of additional benefits, and
at a cost that brings them within reach of
mainstream applications. These are not
simply manufacturing innovations: they are
end-to-end, whole-life solutions that address
every aspect of the manufacture, use and
recycling of carbon fibre reinforced polymer
(CFRP) and the way in which its remarkable
properties can enable new approaches to
vehicle design and manufacture.
“Racetrak™ and 223™ are just two examples
of a new generation of technologies,
developed and commercialised by
Williams Advanced Engineering,” says
Chief Technology Specialist, Lightweight
Structures Iain Bomphray, the Williams
Advanced Engineering innovator behind
these two breakthroughs. “With this
approach, we have the potential to develop
new, growing areas of business that will
also make significant contributions to the
industries in which we work.”
CFRP is a material of huge promise. Its
exceptionally high strength-to-weight
ratio, impressive stiffness and excellent
fatigue and environmental resistance make
it an attractive choice for a wide variety of
industries and applications.
This is particularly pertinent to the
automotive industry, where lightweighting
is seen as one of the primary tools needed
to meet increasingly stringent fuel economy
and emissions targets, as well as support
the range required from electric vehicles.
However, the advantages of CFRP extend
across many sectors, from railway carriages
to wind turbines.
Despite these compelling benefits,
and recent process advances from the
automotive and aerospace industries, a
number of factors have held back the mass
adoption of CFRP. Chief among these is
cost, with traditional composite production
methods involving expensive materials and
lengthy process times. They also incur a
relatively high scrap rate (typically around 30
per cent), compounded by the challenges of
recovering the carbon from pre-impregnated
off-cuts, and of finding value from the
material at the end of the product life.
These challenges have seen the application
of CRFP largely confined to niche
applications. In the automotive sector, for
instance, a body-in-white structure produced
with traditional composite techniques is
typically around 60 per cent lighter than one
manufactured in steel, yet around 20 times
the cost. This has limited its application to
vehicles that are low volume / high cost, or
where the vehicle manufacturer subsidises
the process as part of their learning around
new technologies.
The innovations from Williams Advanced
Engineering aim to address these challenges
to unlock the benefits of CFRP.
“We are focussing our expertise on
energy management, aerodynamics,
thermodynamics and lightweighting. As
tools for efficiency improvement, these are
all highly synergistic, so considering them as
an integrated system allows us to increase
significantly the total benefits,” explains
Williams Advanced Engineering Technical
Director Paul McNamara. “While we have
undoubtedly learnt a great deal from success
in Formula 1 and Formula E, they are high-
profile examples of what we do. Behind
closed doors, we are solving challenging
problems for world-class companies across
a wide range of sectors and working
with some of the most highly-regarded
manufacturers on next-generation, low
carbon technologies.”
For more information see www.wae.com
Issue 38 PECM
177