Application of Reusable Resources in Vehicle Construction

The use of natural fibres to reinforce high-grade plastic components offers not only ecological but also engineering and economical advantages. New respectively further developed processing technologies open up attractive areas of application for this material.

The increasing industrial use of self-replacing raw materials for engineering applications, a frequent demand, has recently entered intense discussion. Using natural fibres to reinforce engineering plastics components turns out to be an approach to using reusable raw materials for material purposes. Preliminary experiments have demonstrated that natural fibres have not only ecological advantages over the currently used glass fibres, but that they also offer a number of engineering and economical advantages. Natural fibres, for instance, due to their low density and their favorable weight-specific properties, are particularly suitable for use in high-grade lightweight components. If natural fibres can be produced in a dissociation process in accordance with the pertinent engineering requirements, their economical advantages over glass fibres will be exploited, too. Natural fibre reinforced components, in contrast to glass fibre reinforced components, have the following advantages:

• lower weight at comparable mechanical properties,
• good reusability,
• no global net CO₂ emission as a result of combustion of the natural fibre component,
• industrial medical advantages in terms of processing and reuse,
• economical reinforcing material and
• creation of a new source of income for the agricultural industry by cultivation of green flax as a starting material for the reinforcing fibres.