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Materials used in automotive components play a key role in providing crash safety to passengers and pedestrians. DuPont's lightweight hybrid material technology, which combines injection molded fiber reinforced plastics with drape molded woven composite materials, provides safety engineers with stiff energy absorbing alternatives. In an effort to validate the hybrid material's crash performance while avoiding expensive crash testing, numerical tools and methodologies are applied in evaluation of a hybrid composite test beam. Multi-scale material models capturing nonlinear strain-rate dependency, anisotropic characteristics, and failure criteria are calibrated on a fiber reinforced plastic and a woven fabric. The fiber orientation and warp/weft angles were extracted from injection and drape molding simulation.

The multitude of megatrends influencing today's auto industry has clearly defined the need for new high performance thermal plastic composite materials that will extend product life under harsh conditions. In response a new family of nylons from DuPont which combines the ease of processing of conventional nylon resins with groundbreaking levels of resistance to chemicals, hot air, oil and coolant were developed. Comprehensive research shows that, in comparison to traditionally stabilized nylons, the lifetime of components can be significantly extended. This, along with other benefits, such as low warpage and an excellent surface appearance, make the new polyamides ideal for a range of applications, which to date have been reserved for metals or considerably more expensive high-performance thermoplastics.

Driven by increasing demands to enhance performance while reducing NVH, weight and cost, automotive designers continue to find innovative ways to use thermoplastic materials in under the hood powertrain applications. Even though these applications have proven reliability meeting long term strength and temperature requirements, North American Automotive Manufacturers (OEMs) are reluctant to use thermoplastics in cam cover applications. The current domestic materials of choice are aluminum, magnesium and vinyl ester, even though thermoplastic materials are widely used in Europe and Asia. New technology and supporting theoretical data has not convinced OEMs to develop a composite cover. Pursuing this effort analytically, a cover/sealing system analysis demonstrating the feasibility and competitive advantage is presented.