While vehicles tend to look more and more sporty these days, even for your regular sedan, there is still work to be done in order to make those rides more environmentally friendly with their emissions. One way to consume less fuel would be to make the car lighter, but not too light, either, so that it does not fly off from the highway at high speeds. As part of the quest to look for additional weight reduction in a ride, a Fraunhofer project group intends to figure out how to build engine cylinder blocks which are made out of plastic – in part, that is.
Lighter engines are not something new, since the very first aluminum engine blocks were rolled out all the way back in the 1960s. However, the plastic engine block has been toyed around with since the 1980s, although plastic parts that were able to handle the engine heat and stress cost a whole lot – and could only be manufactured in small quantities.
This Fraunhofer project group has taken a different approach for new drive systems, by working on an experimental engine with the help of fiber-reinforced plastic that is suitable for injection molding rather than aluminum. Lars-Fredrik Berg, project leader and manager of the research area Lightweight Powertrain Design at NAS, shared, “We used a fiber-reinforced composite material to build a cylinder casing for a one-cylinder research engine. The cylinder casing weighs around 20 percent less than the equivalent aluminum component, and costs the same.”
It is tipped that this engine prototype will be shown off later this month, and there are plans to work on a multi-cylinder engine, too. [Press Release]
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