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The automotive environment, within which original equipment manufacturers (OEM's) design, develop, and produce safety initiatives is fluid in light of regulatory and non-regulatory safety initiatives, and other competitive market realities. As current passive safety systems are being refined and expanded to include the general population, active safety systems covering accident avoidance are presenting a “new frontier” for engineers to explore. Other competitive hurdles include cost, weight, quality, and customer acceptance criteria. To effectively address this complexity, OEM's must completely reinvent safety system design and development processes. Specifically this paper outlines safety system design and development roadblocks encountered due to organizational structure, data analysis bias, and the need for component system integration.

The United States Automotive Materials Partnership Life Cycle Assessment Special Topics Group (USAMP/LCA) has conducted a Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) using a suitable set of metrics to benchmark the environmental (not cost) performance of a generic vehicle, namely, the 1995 Intrepid/Lumina/Taurus. This benchmark will serve as a basis of comparison for environmental performance estimates of new and future vehicles (e.g. PNGV). The participants were Chrysler Corporation, Ford Motor Company, General Motors, The Aluminum Association, The American Iron and Steel Institute, and the American Plastic Council. The study was strictly a life cycle inventory. The approach was to quantify all suitable material and energy inputs and outputs, including air, water, and solid wastes. The inventory covered the entire life cycle; from raw material extraction from the earth, to material production, parts manufacture, vehicle assembly, use, maintenance, recovery/recycling, and disposal.

Most studies on the properties and recycling of automotive shredder residue (ASR) have been carried out without fully understanding the composition of the input scrap. Equally important is understanding the type of shredding process, and types of processes utilized for separation of ferrous and non-ferrous metals from the shredded material. The Vehicle Recycling Partnership (VRP) has been conducting a project:“Study of Plastic Material Recovery From Automotive Shredder Residue” [1]. One of the objectives of this VRP project is to determine the relationship between the shredder input and ASR properties. A 1995 Dodge Stratus was dismantled in detail to obtain information necessary for the project, such as material usage in the vehicle [2]. Then, under tightly controlled conditions, 14 late model Chrysler Cirrus and Dodge Stratus automobiles were shredded and processed.

A descriptive analysis of the Vehicle End-of-Life (VEOL) process in the U.S. is presented. The material recovery process and the reuse of parts are discussed. A computer VEOL model will be presented which would ultimately be used to analyze the impact of specific regulations, markets factors, and/or business policies, on the recyclability of materials and the reuse of parts. The computer model includes several stages of the VEOL process, including vehicle sales, usage, and retirement; also the dismantling of the retired vehicle, shredding operations, parts and vehicle rebuilders, maintenance and repair. An example of the use of the VEOL computer model on material substitution is presented.

Hand dismantling of certain automotive parts has been an accepted process to remove high value materials, but in large scale recycling this may not be economical. In plastics, a pure non contaminated material stream is critical for maintaining high material values and this means designing plastic parts that can be machine separated. One candidate for separating the plastics in vehicle subsystems such as instrument panels and door trim panels is density separation. In order to better understand what processes are required to develop design requirements for automated plastic separation methods Chrysler and the Vehicle Recycling Partnership have undertaken a major materials separation study with MBA Polymers. In this paper, we describe the material separation methods and the application of these methods to three automotive interior assemblies.

With the increasing demand to improve recyclability of automobiles worldwide the Vehicle Recycling Partnership (VRP) a cooperative effort among Chrysler, Ford and General Motors has been formed. The VRP has been developing preferred practices for improvement of recyclability for future vehicle subsystems. These preferred practices are intended to assist engineers and designers in improving recyclability without impairing the performance of the subsystem. This paper discusses the practices of specific design for recycling of plastic bumper fascia systems and what the designer should consider in developing a design to improve and maximize recyclability.