Light weight vehicle design is a keystone to improving fuel efficiency and eco-friendliness in vehicles. Adoption of advanced lightweight ceramic composites as opposed to cast iron, can lead to a radical weight reduction in vehicle components like the braking system. CMC brakes are 60% lighter than cast iron discs and their adoption could save 25kg/car. In addition, CMC brakes reduce particle emissions by 90%, with no emissions of heavy metals.
Hot Press Moulding is the most used technique for CMC brakes manufacturing nowadays. However, it is also one of the primary limiting factors in its adoption. It has several manual steps performed by specialized operators, which raises the production costs. It has a low throughput, high fault rate, high energy consumption rate and uses a lot of raw materials, leading to high production costs. Additionally, the technique does not optimise the fibre orientations during production which yields poor mechanical and thermal properties.
Within this project, Petroceramics is aiming at taking ROLL-IT into the market. ROLL-IT is a fully automated process that combines advanced additive manufacturing techniques with traditional sheet moulding, enabling a continuous and automated forming process of near-to-shape preforms for CMC brake disks. The approach will be particularly suitable to optimize production resources reducing wastage, time, materials and energy and tune the mechanical properties of the final product. Specifically, ROLL-IT will enable absolute control of the reinforcing fibre topology and material properties that mainly affect the disc performances.
