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IAC Advancing With DIY Materials

Each year, IAC Group North America purchases about 300 million lbs. (136 million kg) of raw materials to produce plastic automotive interior components. But in recent years, the auto supplier increasingly has pursued the do-it-yourself route, developing its own raw-material compounds to meet customer or product-performance specifications. We're one of the very few Tier 1 suppliers capable of vertically

Each year, IAC Group North America purchases about 300 million lbs. (136 million kg) of raw materials to produce plastic automotive interior components.

But in recent years, the auto supplier increasingly has pursued the do-it-yourself route, developing its own raw-material compounds to meet customer or product-performance specifications.

“We're one of the very few Tier 1 suppliers capable of vertically integrating our own materials, and it is to resolve some of the issues we have with some of the on-the-shelf materials the typical materials suppliers would sell to us,” says Rose Ryntz, IAC's director-advanced engineering material development.

IAC estimates it produces 90 million lbs. (41 million kg) of compounded raw material a year, meeting a quarter of its needs internally.

The supplier has six compounding facilities in North America, and the materials then are molded into door panels, air ducts, consoles and cargo bins.

IAC is a relatively new supplier, assembled between 2006 and 2007 from pieces of Lear Corp., Textron Automotive Co. and the former Collins & Aikman Corp.

It was about that time the company decided to vertically integrate its own materials expertise as a strategic plan moving forward.

The company has produced its own unique plastics from polyvinyl chloride, rubber and thermoplastic olefin.

In the course of developing new products for market, IAC has found several failures attributed directly to materials that had been purchased and did not meet performance specifications, says Lee Childers, vice president-advanced development and tooling.

Soon, IAC will add a validation lab specifically for raw materials at its Validation and Rapid Prototype Center in Troy, MI, next to IAC's Development and Pre-production Center. Together, the facilities, which opened in 2008, experiment with new products and materials and prove them out before production begins.

Childers says IAC will continue buying a lot of raw materials from other producers. With so much of IAC's business riding on the success of its interior plastics, the supplier is pursuing aggressively natural fibers to replace petroleum-based materials.

The three most popular natural fibers appearing in interior plastics today are kenaf, jute and flax, but IAC also is experimenting with byproducts of rice and coconuts and popular U.S. crops such as corn and wheat, as well as lumber.

Ryntz says natural fibers can comprise up to 30% of automotive plastics, and that percentage is expected to rise. Often, these natural fibers are replacing petroleum products or fillers such as talc.

For instance, IAC integrates wheat flour in the glovebox of the Ford Flex. “We take different materials and we can blend them, try different percentages of natural fibers to plastic,” Childers says.

Without this capability, Childers says evaluating a new material from an outside supplier often required molding a component on the weekend, when production lines are idle, at additional expense. Often, those components would fail miserably in validation tests.

With materials developed internally, Ryntz says she is “80% to 90% confident we will hit the mark because of the development work we do at the chemical level.”

In 2009, the Validation and Rapid Prototype Center conducted 2,500 tests, fabricated 850 rapid prototypes and built 45,000 full prototypes for auto makers.

A new material getting lots of attention in the center is DeepClear, which allows any image to be printed on paper, then molded to a substrate and capped with a layer of protective acrylic.

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