Faurecia Flaxpreg, a green and light very long flax fiber reinforced composite sandwich, received the JEC Europe 2015 Innovation Award in the semi-products category.
 
Flaxpreg can be applied by automakers as a multi-position trunk load floor or a structural floor in the passenger compartment of a vehicle. The use of unidirectional long nonwoven flax fibers as reinforcement is the key innovation allowing a drastic weight reduction.
 
The Flaxpreg project, developed by Faurecia with PSA Peugeot-Citröen, Lineo and the University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne, France, started in 2011 and aims to design structural trim parts, following three key objectives: a drastic weight reduction, the use of renewable resources and a process in line with automotive cycle times and material costs constraints meeting the requirements of automotive mass production.
 
Thanks to its very low density, Flaxpreg offers excellent mechanical properties allowing for a 35% weight reduction compared to traditional petro-based glass mat, polyurethane sandwich solutions.
 
“The originality of the Flaxpreg sandwich lies in the suppression of the spinning and weaving step, which first goal is to drastically reduce the production cost of the nonwoven FlaxTape. It also offers superior mechanical properties thanks to perfectly in-plane aligned and non-twisted reinforcement fibers, which results in significant weight reduction,” states Arnaud Duval, acoustics innovation manager at Faurecia Interior Systems.
 
The first part of the Flaxpreg project consisted in developing a homogeneous easy to handle flax tape directly produced from flax ribbons, the raw material of the traditional spinning, thus avoiding the patented weaving step. The second part dealt with the impregnation of the acrylic resin directly in line in order to produce a pre-impregnated material known as prepreg. The third and final step consisted in developing the Flaxpreg sandwich construction using a paper honeycomb structure with cycle times under two minutes per part. Finally, Flaxpreg offers excellent vibro-acoustic damping properties, according to the company.
 
The first targets for Faurecia with Flaxpreg are to address automakers for the structural trunk load floor market typically dominated by more traditional materials. Further applications such as package trays, door trims or seat backrests are currently under investigation. The first series applications of Flaxpreg are expected to reach market in 2018 for European automakers.