Mitigating Energy Requirement in Transport System Via Material Selection

In view of sudden changes in climatic weather conditions, resulting in variation and dislocation of environment and biodiversity, there has been new initiatives in automotive industry to develop a lighter and sustainable materials to mitigate fossil fuel demand in transport system and improve the overall vehicular part maintenance. In almost all the developed part of the world, major car manufacturer have evolved new composite materials to replace original equipment body as government regulations become stricter in response to worsening environmental degradation. The concept of this paper is to report findings on new material formation using hand lay-up as manucturing technique. In this paper, part of the novel approach in transport system is the possibility of payload reduction through the adaptation of new materials as external and internal parts of the system. Five materials were processed in this work with two specimens oriented at varying degree (30° and 60°) while the other three were without degree of orientation. The payload of these materials were estimated using all the conceptual parameters of a typical vehicle system and the findings from this research showed that 10%wt. of fibre at 30° orientation in the matrix, will possibly offer the lowest panel weight as presented in this paper. This study may be investigated further with a view to test the energy consumption of this new material via-a-viz other reinforced composite materials.