Lightweight Construction Materials: Suitable for Car Wheels?

[Tank]

Lightweight Construction Materials: Suitable for Car Wheels?

ScienceDaily (Oct. 2, 2010) â€" Just imagine your car suddenly comes to a halt on a quiet country road, and it's only four years old. This is not a pleasant thought. A breakdown is expensive. Not to mention the safety risk to the occupants -- because the breakdown was caused by the extremely light plastic wheels so highly praised by the car salesman. One of them has broken.

"Such a scenario must, of course, never happen in reality," states Prof. Dr.-Ing. Andreas Büter from the Fraunhofer Institute for Structural Durability and System Reliability LBF in Darmstadt. The experts there specialize in operational strength testing of plastics in general and plastic wheels in particular...

Why are light weight wheels important? The lighter the wheel the easier it is for the suspension to operate efficiently and effectively. The suspension itself can be made out of lighter components. This combination improves fuel consumption as the lighter the vehicle is the smaller the amount of energy required to accelerate it to a given speed in a given time. Thus a smaller lighter engine can be used that requires less fuel for a given range. Thus a smaller lighter fuel tank can be used and so on... Over the life span of a vehicle every excess kilo of extra weight does nothing but waste fuel and cost the owner money.

Fiat designed an almost completely plastic car in the mid/late 70's. The design was prompted by the child of one of the directors getting to the age where they wanted to drive. While the father was very rich he was still appalled that there was not a cheap, new basic car that his child could afford. In the resultant development a car was produced that weighed about 500kg (1,200lb). It had a 750cc engine that did 65mpg, it could get to 80mph and carried 4 people comfortably. The passenger seats were a sort of hammock style made of netting and could be removed in minutes if you wanted to carry bulky stuff. The engine, gearbox (automatic) and drive system were all in a sealed module that could be removed in one piece and replaced in 8 minutes. If something went wrong you went to the garage, they swapped out the power unit, you drove off with a temporary replacement while the garage fixed your power unit. There was no bonnet (hood) the power unit was sealed and formed the front of the car, it contained all the liquids and the appropriate holes to replenish said fluids from the outside. I remember seeing this on 'Tomorrows World' and at the time I was really interested as I was just getting to the point where I wanted a car and that looked like a bloody good idea. Needless to say it was far too radical and never got onto the market.