Love the new fabric! In the second paragraph, there is a statement asserting that the car, being electric, produces no CO2 emissions. I think we should count the fraction of the emissions of the power plant for the energy used to charge the car. It would be significantly less than an HC fueled car, due to efficiency and averaging across coal/nuclear/wind/solar/hydro, etc. generation. I just think that zero is a bit misleading. Not that I don't like electric cars ... It's the ONLY way I would ever drive anything ultimately powered by wind or nuclear.
I agree Justajo about the long standing recycling aspects of the auto industry. The cars don't get melted down until all useable parts have stripped off. Then what's left gets melted down to make new cars. Steel's big argument against composite materials is the ease with which steel can recycled.
TJ, I can assure you that fabric made from recycled plastic bottles absolutely feels like that made from new or even natural material. There's a chance that you've worn or handled fabric made from recycled plastic. This technology is so advanced that one is hard pressed to tell the difference.
It's good to see that the automotive industry is getting more into recycling, though it has been there for quite some time in one way or another. As one example, think of the auto salvage yard. These have been around for decades. Parts from old or wrecked car and trucks are reused. What isn't reused gets melted down, as in the case of steel and aluminum, and likely ends up in more cars.
As another example of this re-use aspect (and to show my age) back in 1969, when I had been laying carpet for a few years, I had my first glimpse of "rebond" carpet padding. I wondered about it's appearance, that it looked like it was made from various bits of foam, and I was told that's exactly what it was and still is. The majority of this foam (as well as vinyl fabric and other synthetics) came from and still comes from, I'm sure, the auto and furniture industry. And now, since rebond pad is made from the scraps left over in upholstering with car making the major source, we may soon see RE-recycling as the scraps of that redone plastic ends up on floors of houses and commercial buildings.
@Ann: Good article. However, you might want to clarify that, while Unifi makes both Repreve polyester fiber and Repreve nylon filament, these are two different products. The polyester fiber contains both pre- and post-consumer waste material, while the nylon fiber contains only pre-consumer waste material.
It's amazing what a customer mandate will do. Ford asked its suppliers to come up with post-consumer waste interior materials and its supplier got imaginative. I guess that's the old saw of necessity being the mother of invention. Various supplier mandates from Wal-Mart have also been effective.
If car seats are anything like the fabrics used in clothing, I think you can still maintain a pretty good look and feel. I've seen some pretty amazing things done with recyclable materials in clothing, even household items. High end vehicles typically don't have fabrics--they are usually equipped with leather upholstery. My guess is we'll see some pretty compelling options going forward.
This is pretty cool. I would think that a full-out campaign to use sustainable materials in vehicles, be it car seats, rugs, or whatever, might actually have more impact on reducing carbon footprint than auto makers' EV plans, given the relatively small audience still for those cars. I hope we see more manufacturers follow this route.
A new battery design, which replaces lithium with abundant and low-cost elemental sulfur, is still in its nascent stages but shows real promise for giving batteries more energy potential.
PTC will offer a virtual desktop environment for its Creo product design applications, potentially freeing engineers to run them from remote desktops on a variety of operating systems and mobile devices.
The push to achieving more intelligent, integrated manufacturing is putting a strong focus on networking and connectivity as key enabling technologies.
Now that solar and wind harvesting technologies are a thriving market, researchers are seeking other environmentally related energy sources for which they can create harvesting devices.
From Dell / Intel® New Paradigms in Design Work Scott Hamilton, vertical market strategist for Dell Precision workstations, 5/2/2013 5
Early in my career, I worked as a draftsman and remember the days of drawing on vellum with numbered pencils and Mylar with plastic lead. This was a fun experience in the sense that I ...
I've been using workstations for more than 10 years and love finding ways to get more performance from my system. With demanding professional applications that require more power each ...
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For industrial control applications, or even a simple assembly line, that machine can go almost 24/7 without a break. But what happens when the task is a little more complex? That’s where the “smart” machine would come in. The smart machine is one that has some simple (or complex in some cases) processing capability to be able to adapt to changing conditions. Such machines are suited for a host of applications, including automotive, aerospace, defense, medical, computers and electronics, telecommunications, consumer goods, and so on. This radio show will show what’s possible with smart machines, and what tradeoffs need to be made to implement such a solution.
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