DETROIT – A car designed in North America uses about half as many parts made of nylon as one designed in Europe, and that looks like opportunity to chemicals supplier Lanxess.
While it is a major supplier to auto makers in the U.S., the company is not as well known in the Detroit automotive community as competitors such as DuPont and BASF.
An interest in raising its profile and touting its materials technology led Lanxess to host the “Automotive Day” conference here recently, says Jens-H. Fischer, general manager-Americas.
The company was spun off from German chemical and pharmaceutical giant Bayer in 2004, and its North American headquarters is in Pittsburgh only a few miles from Bayer’s North American headquarters, but the two now are completely separate, Fischer says.
A year ago, Lanxess opened a $20 million compounding plant in Gastonia, NC, where basic polymers such as polyamide (the generic name for nylon) and polybutylene terephthalate are mixed and refined with special additives and glass fibers, for specific customer needs, to produce Durethan and Pocan brands of plastics.
Both high-tech plastics have a variety of automotive applications, including body parts, oil pans, coolant pipes, battery housings, steering rods, pedals and pedal brackets.
At the Detroit conference, Lanxess also touts Tepex, an ultra-strong thermoplastic composite sheet that uses polyamide combined with long glass fibers, instead of short chopped-up fibers like typical plastic composites. The supplier says the material is stronger and lighter than steel or aluminum in some applications.
The composite sheet can provide many of the same benefits as carbon fiber at a fraction of the cost, says Michael Zobel, managing director-high performance materials.
In the North American automotive market, Lanxess is focusing initially on front-end modules and winning new polyamide applications for transmission and engine oil pans currently made from metal, Fischer tells WardsAuto.
Further down the road, the supplier is looking at winning new applications for body-in-white structural parts and electric-vehicle components.
Plastic-metal hybrid structures are an area where Lanxess has special expertise and hopes to expand, Fischer says. More than 80 million cars already use some form of the technology, although they are mostly European or Asian designs.
For instance, Volkswagen and Audi have used plastic-metal hybrid structures extensively for front-end modules and other components.
The latest-generation Audi A8 employs a plastic-metal front-end module that combines aluminum with Tepex and Durathan and is 20% lighter than a comparable aluminum-intensive structure, says Hartwig Meier, global product and application development-high performance materials.
So far, Lanxess’ expansion in North America is going well. Production for the new North Carolina compounding plant is sold out for the rest of the year, and capacity likely will be increased, company officials say.
