Eco-Friendly Recycled PET (Polyethylene Terephthalate) Material for Automotive Canopy Strip Application

This paper describes the suitability of recycled polyethylene terephthalate (RPET) material for canopy strip in a commercial vehicle. The material described in this paper is a PET compound recycled from used PET bottles and reinforced with glass fibers so as to meet the product's functional requirements. The application described in this paper is a Canopy strip which is a structural exterior plastic part. Canopy strip acts as a structural frame to hold the Vinyl canopy in both sides of the vehicle. Functionally, the part demands a material with adequate mechanical and thermal properties.

Generally, PET bottles are thrown after use thereby creating land pollution. PET being inert takes an extremely long time to degrade thereby occupying huge amount of space in landfills and directly affecting rain water percolation. This work focused on recycling the PET bottles and compounding them suitably so as convert them into useful automotive parts. The parts made out of this sustainable solution were validated for thermal ageing, cold impact and other vehicle level durability performance related tests and found to meet the functional requirements. Overall, 90-100 bottles were recycled to mold six canopy strip parts per vehicle thereby reducing CO2 emission.