Automotive polyurethanes face a complex future

Peter Fuss of Ernst & Young and Andy Walton, Huntsman’s strategic marketing manager, automotive, opened the recent Automotive Polyurethanes, for performance and profit conference in Amsterdam. Simon Robinson reports.

The polyurethane industry has to understand the forces affecting the automotive industry if it is to take advantage of the opportunities that localisation, light-weighting, the move to hybrid and then electric cars offer in the future, said Peter Fuss, of Ernst & Young.

The automotive industry is on the edge of a new round of reinvention driven by lower emissions and the need to conserve resources. “The car needs to go on a diet,” he said.

Today, he said the “global car park is around 900 million cars, by 2050 we will get to a global car park of around 2 billion cars. This is a good figure, it’s a global growth industry,” he said.

Andy Walton, strategic marketing manager, automotive, Huntsman said: “The thought of 2 bn cars by 2050 is a good thing. We have a future industry ahead of us. The challenge is that the thought of sitting in traffic is a downside.”

Fuss added: “If we continue to design cars as we have in the past, we will need twice as much fossil-based input as today. This is unsustainable. It will take a significant effort to get to 2bn cars and use less resources than today. Whether we like it or not, the pressure is there. The regulators, whether they are in Brussels, Silicon Valley or China they all live in the same world,” said Fuss.

Walton said: “In the 30 years from the 1970s to 2000 cars doubled in weight thanks to added features such as safety, air con and improved comfort. We spent the next 11 years trying to go on a diet, and we've done a bit of slimming, but there’s still a long way to go.”

Polyurethane can contribute to reducing the weight, increasing the fuel efficiency and raising the volume of renewable content in cars, Walton and Fuss agreed.

Increasing complexity

“But this has to be seen in the context of a car industry that is changing shape and increasing in complexity. Asia-Pacific and other regions will grow. It is possible in future that European production will be cut, warned Fuss. As the centre of gravity of car production shifts towards Asia and away from Europe, regulations will increasingly be driven by the new locations, said Fuss. China now produces 18m cars/year, on a par with Europe, and China’s need to reduce pollution is starting to drive emission standards there. “Megacities, are going to drive the design of cars in the future and not the other way round. We have made cars for general use, now megacities are going to dictate what they want, for example zero emission in areas of China,” said Walton.

“If you look ahead 10 years there will be major production capacity in China, Brazil, Mexico and the US,” said Fuss. “When companies reach 100,000 or 200,000 cars sold in a region it makes sense to open production. It will replace European exports,” he said.

Walton said: “The increased use of platforms by car producers is one of the major changes over the last 20 years and the pace of this change is increasing rapidly over the next five years.”

In the future there will be “more global platforms, better economies of scale, better reproducibility,” said Walton.

It may make sense for the polyurethane converters such as foamers to locate its production close to their automotive customers when they start producing locally, Fuss suggested. A balance between centralised production and being close to the customer will have to be struck, Fuss added.

He did imply that there could be incentives for polyurethane converters to locate close to carmakers in the future. There is a “balance which we will need to understand between localisation and centralisation. Governments have only one interest and that is to benefit from car production and they want to employ other people,” he said.

Car production is moving out, or in

While that structural change is about to start, the move to electric and hybrid cars is already well underway. This is being driven by the need to reduce emissions and improve fuel efficiency. While this is happening technological changes, such as self-driving cars, are on the horizon. There are also sociological changes coming, will young people want to own a car in the future, or will car-sharing and car-clubs become more important in cities?

“Taking a short-term focus between 2010 and 2017 you can see that polyurethane, plastics, carbon fibre materials are on their way to replacing traditional and steel materials. PU and other materials are the only way to reduce the weight of the car,” said Fuss.

The costs of materials and production may be considerably higher, Fuss warned but this problem could be overcome by economies of scale and other improvements, he said.

It will be a hard fight for the PU industry, Fuss said: “There is substitution within different types of steels and metals. Changing from steel to magnesium to aluminium can help to reduce the weight, said Fuss. “At a recent Geneva motor show,” he added, “a Range Rover was shown which weighed 400kg less than earlier models. This was done by moving from steel to magnesium and aluminium in some vehicle parts,” said Fuss.

Walton echoed this: “Polyurethane is just one material of a whole palette of materials that the OEMs have to design a car with. If you look at the overall plastics segment, it’s about 12% of the overall materials palette and within that polyurethane is about 19%, so about 1.5% of the car is polyurethane. We have competitors such as metals, other plastics, fibre, rubber and so on.”

Intermaterial competition

Aluminium is probably the bigger competitor material than epoxy and magnesium, he said.

However, Walton warned that it would be a mistake to write-off steel. It “is a very versatile material and manufacturers are further developing high-strength steels, he said. Walton added that new steels are harder to form. “I think the big competitor is aluminium. It will be necessary to work closely with machine manufacturers and carbon fibre suppliers to improve process economics.

“Economics are important and moving directly into composite is probably not an obvious choice for an OEM. The costs and economics of moving to carbon fibre composites are quite high,” said Walton.

Polyurethanes can offer shorter cycle times than epoxies, Walton said: “In aerospace two hour cycle times might be acceptable, in the automotive industry cycle times need to be less than five minutes or even faster.”

Polyurethane’s relatively short cycle times will be a useful tool to win market from other materials and “I think over the next five years there will be a big increase in polyurethanes depending on the type of parts and what the needs are in terms of properties and process,” said Walton.

“Developments will start in safer areas, such as semi-structural parts,” Walton predicted. He added, “More work needs to be done looking at the capital requirements to set up machinery, production footprint, and part production speed.

“If you look at the way they’re making composite today is a very serial process we need a revolution in processing to bring down the cost significantly in composite’s and that’s probably where we would see the future direction,” he said.

Lightweighting is one approach to reducing environmental footprint either as carbon dioxide emissions or as fuel efficiency. Other approaches include reducing air resistance, or changing the power plant.

“CO₂ can quickly be reduced to meet consumer by improving aerodynamics,” Walton said. “The challenge is not how to reduce the roof height, that’s okay, but inside the car, the powertrain is changing.

Squeezing the middle

“As roofs are coming down, batteries are starting to go up from the bottom and into the passenger compartment,” he said. A key challenge in interiors is how to retain the feeling of spaciousness that customers demand. One way of doing this is to make seat-cushions thinner, Walton said.

There are three elements which affect the driver: One is dynamic driving comfort, especially a thin seat. If the foam loses stiffness over time then the driver’s position changes. You can’t just use the same foam formulation for a thin and a thick seat. It needs a lot of work.

Another area of comfort is hydrothermal comfort. Polyurethane foams are quite insulating and polyurethane seat cushions are one of the reasons we use air con in summer. Polyurethane can help a lot in terms of reducing heat build-up and sweating us while were sitting inside a car. Managing the heat build-up can directly improve fuel efficiency by reducing the amount of power that the air conditioning unit needs to take from the engine, he said.

Making the components inside the passenger compartment lighter changes the acoustic properties of the space.

For example, pass-by noise in the passenger space is becoming increasingly unwelcome. There is increasing demand for insulation in engine areas especially in diesel engines, and polyurethane can be used to absorb that noise, said Walton.

“Electric engines do not make much noise, but have a different acoustic. Finally, there are still wheels touching the road, it is still noise transmission. The acoustic demand is different, it has a higher frequency, he added.

Fuss warned that the car industry is becoming harder to understand: “The polyurethane industry has to understand what customers want from the future.

Gen Y wants different things

In the future, car users may not wish to own a car they may prefer to share cars. The younger generation has different feelings about cars. A car is for example to be used for individual mobility, to get from A to B, Fuss said. H He added that this culture change is one of the reasons that autonomous driving is on the agenda. As traffic jams in cities become worse with time, many automotive producers and Tier 1 suppliers like Bosch and Continental are examining autonomous driving cars as a more clever way to move from A to B. Autonomous driving could help reduce the number of accidents in the future.

“Even if you’re a traffic jam you can work on the car because you don’t have to focus on driving, you don’t have to have the steering wheel. We will use cars a different way probably as integrated personal transportation/public transportation system and also car sharing will be very important,” Fuss said.

Generation Y has a different perspective on owning a car to the people at this conference. We’ve grown up with status, the idea of having a car for freedom, generation Y has far more opportunity to travel without the need of the car so the opportunities for mega city cars is an opportunity for polyurethane, Walton said.

Increased customisation means more differentiation there are more segments than before. Generation Y wants something more differentiated than perhaps we did.

“Polyurethane is a very versatile material it rises to the challenge it does that whilst balancing total cost weight and comfort”, said Walton.