Future Plastics and Composite-Intensive Vehicles Increase Fuel Efficiency
In order to promote the development of more fuel efficient vehicles that do not compromise safety, Congress directed the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to "examine the possible safety benefits of lightweight plastic and composite intensive vehicles (PCIVs)."
NHTSA engaged the Volpe Center to explore this topic by working with other vehicle safety stakeholders in the government and private sector to identify, summarize and evaluate the existing knowledge base and determine additional research needs and priorities to accomplish this goal.
Initial studies led to the release of a Centerauthored report in 2007, A Safety Roadmap for Future Plastics and Composite Intensive Vehicles (PCIVs), posted at Safety Roadmap. The report covers research needs for the next fifteen years. It also identified a number of potential collaborators in this research, including the American Chemical Council-Plastics Division (ACC-PD) and the United States Council for Automotive Research (USCAR) FreedomCar Partnership Automotive Lightweight Materials R&D Consortia, as well as standards-setting organizations such as the Society of Automotive Engineers and the American Society for Testing and Materials.
In August 2008, the Volpe Center hosted a workshop with attendees from the U.S. DOT and the broader stakeholder community. Participants identified knowledge gaps and developed a consensus on research and technology priorities, discussed the metrics and milestones necessary for assessing the crash-worthiness of PCIV materials, and refined the potential safety challenges and opportunities of using additional lightweight materials in vehicles.
The summary and proceedings of this workshop are now available online at PCIV Proceedings. A key conclusion was that "safety research for future PCIVs must be strategically focused on providing adequate tools and data to the automotive industry to allow them to confidently design and produce economically viable commercial light and fuel-efficient vehicles with crash safety performance equivalent to or better than today's vehicles. The most basic element of this research will require enhancing the understanding of relevant crash environment material failure mechanisms and their interactions."
Ongoing research is addressing the knowledge gaps identified by the Roadmap. Drs. Aviva Brecher and John Brewer of the Volpe Center collaborated with NHTSA to prepare a paper on this project for presentation at the International Enhanced Safety of Vehicles Conference in Stuttgart, Germany this summer.
Dr. Aviva Brecher, right, led Center efforts to develop a research agenda for the safety of next generation lightweight fuel efficient vehicles. The PCIV safety research project team also includes Samuel Toma and Dr. John Brewer. (
Volpe Center photo)
