JEC COMPOSITES MAGAZINE - Issue #109 - November/December 2016 - 28

MANUFACTURING RTM

Fig. 7: LCA manufacturing phase

Fig. 3: Temperature distribution on the heated skin just after
opening the insulated hood

Fig. 5: Door skin with an electrically-conductive
in-mould primer

powder gelcoat (Figure 3 and Figure 4).
Compared to conventional mould heating technologies, e.g. copper or fluid
based, energy consumption is considerably lower.
Case studies
Two products, representative of the advantages of this new production line,
were selected as demonstrators: a fullyfinished cover for an agricultural machine
and an automotive door skin ready for
electrostatic painting. The door skin is
an example of a metal replacement product. The agricultural machine cover is an
example of a current RTM component
upgraded through the new process developed within the Ecogel project. Some
parts were produced for each demonstrator, as shown in Figure 5 and 6.
Conclusions
The introduction of in-mould powder gelcoats in the RTM composites industry will
make it possible to increase production
rates to obtain either fully-finished parts or

Fig. 4: Pilot plant homogeneous
mould heating

Fig. 6: Fully-finished cover
for an agricultural machine

parts ready for final electrostatic painting.
The main advantages of powder gelcoats
are that curing times are dramatically reduced and styrene emissions are removed
from the workplace. Moreover, there are
other advantages such as the facts that this
is a ready-to-use formulation (no further
addition of catalysts or accelerators), the
yield per square metre is higher than in a
liquid gelcoat (1:4) and shelf life is around
one year, so that handling and storage are
really easy. Additionally, conductive powder gelcoats can be used as a primer for
final parts painting, avoiding high-cost secondary processes. To reach this objective,
conductive powder gelcoat formulations
should be adapted to each process in order
to enhance final surface quality. To be able

to apply the powder gelcoat, electricallyconductive hot mould technologies based
on carbon-fibre plastics laminates were developed within the project. The results are
satisfactory at this point, but engineering
challenges are still to be addressed such as
increasing the durability of the mould.
From an environmental point of view, replacing a steel door skin with an Ecogel
composite door skin brings about major
savings in global warming and energy, as
shown in Figure 7.
Moreover, focusing on the use phase, the
total vehicle weight reduction means an
estimated reduction of approximately 2.8
tonnes of CO2 emissions with respect to
current emissions (Figure 8).
The project consortium includes 13
European
organizations:
Aimplas,
Ecoinnova, and Cidetec (Spain);
Composite Integration, Axon, FAR-UK,
and NetComposites (United Kingdom);
Clerium
(Netherlands);
Indupol
International N.V. (Belgium); e-Xstream
Engineering (Luxembourg); Bielefeld
University (FHBI) (Germany); Ketek
(Finland); Megara (Greece); and Steel Belt
Systems Powder Coating Division (SBS)
(Italy). The research leading to these results
received a grant from the EU (FP7/20072013) Seventh Framework Programme under grant agreement no. 609203.
More information:
www.aimplas.es

Fig. 8. LCA use phase

Savings

Fuel,
litres

Global warming,
kg CO2

Costs,
€

Savings per 100 km

~ 0.3

1.44

~0.78

Savings for life time (200,000 km)

1200

2800

1560

jec composites magazine / No109 November - December 2016

http://www.aimplas.es

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of JEC COMPOSITES MAGAZINE - Issue #109 - November/December 2016