I first heard about Carbon Revolution last year when they were featured in an article in the Australian Financial Review. At that time they were looking at a possible Initial Public Offering and they had recently opened a new factory in Geelong near Melbourne. They are a true success story in the automotive industry from Australia - at a time when the main manufacturers have … [Read more...]
Lightweight Designs
In this article I will discuss the concepts and work being done around lightweight designs. The article follows on from a recent description of the ladder chassis. The downside of the ladder chassis is that the body sits on top and the whole vehicle can be quite heavy. Conceptually, this is a simple topic, but in practice is somewhat more difficult to achieve. It is simple … [Read more...]
Kevlar
A few weeks ago, I described carbon fibre and this article is about Kevlar – another material discovered via chemistry. It was back in 1965 that a chemist at Du Pont, Stephanie Kwolek, discovered the forerunner of Kevlar. She had mixed a batch of polymers and it was cloudy rather than clear and so she decided to test it further. The cloudy solution was spun into a very light … [Read more...]
Carbon Fibre
Carbon fibre was first developed in the late 1950s by a scientist at a Union Carbide facility in the US. It was actually a by-product of other experiments and they found that they had created a fibre with about 20% carbon in it. It was also less than a 10th the diameter of a human hair! What the scientist had done was heat Rayon, a cellulose based fibre originally made in … [Read more...]