Mazda's New Plastic Goes Zoom Zoom

December 13, 2001

Sacramento - Japan's Mazda says it has developed a "super-strong" long-glass fiber reinforced polypropylene that is allowing it to use plastics where they were never used before, thereby reducing weight and consolidating parts. Mazda says it is using the new plastic to injection mold the front end module that supports the radiator and the door module carriers on its new Atenza. But the company says this is just the beginning, as it plans to use the material elsewhere on the car to reduce weight. Mazda says the material is also highly recyclable.

However, if Mazda thinks it has a corner on the long fiber reinforced thermoplastics market, it's in for big surprise. It has taken a while to catch someone's attention on what long fibers can do, but right now it is one of the hottest topics in plastics. In fact, long-fiber reinforced polypropylene has been used in front ends in European vehicles for several years. Many of the new applications for long fiber reinforced thermoplastics are being driven by the automotive industry where the products are found to be reasonable in price, fairly easy to mold, and recyclable.

Mazda has done some interesting work on its own. A key to obtaining the high mechanical properties that long fiber can offer to the finished part is to avoid breaking the fibers into pieces. Conventional high pressure injection molding can do that. Mazda uses a high crystalline PP resin with an extremely low viscosity that requires less pressure in the molding process. The company says the resin matrix is about 30% more fluid than a conventional glass-reinforced PP. Mazda also credits the low viscosity of the resin matrix for preventing the glass fibers to rise to the surface, resulting in an exterior part finish that often requires no painting.

Mazda has also altered the injection molding technique for parts made from its proprietary resin. Mazda says it uses a technique that uses only low pressure and which results in long-glass fiber strands that are 10 times as long as those produced using conventional molding methods.