Low Cost Carbon Fiber Composites for Lightweight Vehicle Parts

78845S The Department of Energy desires to increase fuel efficiency by reducing vehicle weight. Carbon fiber composites offer one promising way to do this, but difficulties in building economical, consistent, high quality preforms has limited the introduction of this material. This project will to adapt a well established pulp molding technology to produce carbon fiber preforms for lightweight vehicle parts. This process is currently used to make highly controlled products such as speaker cones at very high production rates. In Phase I, a die will be designed and built to produce preforms for a b-pillar cross section test part. A statistically designed set of experiments will be conducted to cover a range of compositional and production variables. The quality of the test preforms will be compared to published data on similar preforms for this part. Commercial Applications and Other Benefits as described by the awardee: The technology should enable the use of carbon fiber composites in high strength, low weight vehicle parts at prices competitve with conventional metal parts.