Each year, the CU-ICAR students work with an automotive manufacturer to develop a concept vehicle that achieves futuristic goals. This year's version, the Deep Orange 5 vehicle, is focused on achieving personal urban mobility for so-called mega-cities in 2020, and is targeted for marketing to generations Y and Z.

Working collaboratively, students, multi-disciplinary faculty and participating industry partners like Dow Automotive Systems focus on producing a new vehicle prototype each year.

Project

This year, CU-ICAR students specified Dow Automotive Systems BETAFORCE and BETAMATE structural adhesives as part of the Deep Orange 5 vehicle joining strategy, with the goal of successfully bonding aluminium and carbon fibre composite for body panels and the vehicle structure.

Epoxy resins from Dow Automotive Systems were also specified for the upper body structures that were produced via a resin transfer moulding on a carbon fibre pre-form. The carbon fibre and epoxy materials enabled weight savings and helped create a lower centre of gravity for the vehicle.

Lightweighting goals

“To help the Deep Orange development team achieve their lightweighting goals, Dow Automotive Systems created a customized formulation of a VORAFORCE epoxy resin matrix system,” explained Allan James, Composite Structures Marketing Manager at Dow Automotive Systems.

“This enabled the VORAFORCE to offer an adjusted cure time to work with the Deep Orange development system. It’s exactly like the collaborative work we do with customers. Once we understand their production goals and systems, we can formulate products that meet specific needs.”

Successful collaboration

“Working with the experienced team and proven materials from Dow Automotive Systems gave us great insight and helped us achieve some of our most important goals,” commented Dr Paul Venhovens, BMW Endowed Chair in Systems integration at CU-ICAR.

“We were pleased to successfully bond dissimilar substrates and get an epoxy system for the carbon fibre structures that would support our production capabilities. We look forward to working with Dow Automotive Systems again on the Deep Orange 6 vehicle.”

www.dowautomotive.com