The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced last week that it would partner with PPG on resources meant to accelerate the development and testing of adhesives made explicitly for vehicles built from lightweight materials.
“It is critical to understand how adhesive bonds evolve over the life of a vehicle,” Peter Votruba-Drzal, PPG global technical director of automotive OEM coatings, said. “This knowledge has traditionally come through iterative formulation and testing, including lengthy exposure tests. This project will enable us to reduce adhesives testing time by up to 75 percent, which in turn will help manufacturers accelerate their development of increasingly energy-efficient vehicles.”
The coatings company PPG will work individually with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) to create computer-based models that showcase the aging characteristics of various next-generation adhesives designed to unite lightweight materials such as high-strength steel, aluminum, and carbon-fiber composites. The end goal is vehicles with reduced mass and greater fuel economy, held together by adhesives that mitigate corrosion and thermal expansion issues.
PPG will put up $60,000 for the project in the form of technical activities, while DOE will provide another $300,000 to LLNL and PNNL for modeling and use of their supercomputing resources. Supercomputing is necessary due to the large data sets needed for the appropriate simulations, which will focus on the influence of water on the chemistry and adhesion properties of various adhesives used to join the lightweight materials.