Driving Material Innovation in the Automotive Industry with our Application Development Centers of Excellence

Driving Material Innovation in the Automotive Industry with our Application Development Centers of Excellence

At which stage of automotive product design should you engage your material supplier? The answer is as early as possible. At Teknor Apex, we can support this early involvement thanks to our Application Development Centers of Excellence. As a result, we don’t just supply your vehicle with compounds. We also have the design, engineering and process optimization capabilities you need to successfully develop your application, from start to finish.

With locations in the United States, Germany and China, our Application Development Centers are where you develop compounds to solve your toughest challenges. Using our production-scale equipment, you can explore new ideas, solve production issues and shorten your time to market while testing new materials or concepts. Our onsite engineers are ready to help you bring your designs to life.

Here’s a quick rundown of some of our center’s tools and capabilities:

Moldflow® Injection Molding Simulation.

This simulation tool optimizes the injection molding process by predicting variables like cavity fill, number of required gates, fill pressure and press tonnage. It also predicts weld line locations, venting positions and cycle times.

Finite Element Analysis (FEA) Software.

We use our FEA tools to understand a component’s behavior, as well to prevent deformed shapes, stress, strain and creep. Other capabilities include large strain elastic, viscoelastic, heat transfer and thermal analyses, as well as an ability to model multilayer structures for co-extrusion and two-shot injection molding.

Injection Molding.

Whether you have a simple or complex part, our commercial-scale injection molding hardware lets you easily replicate processes. Our centers house various injection molding machines up to 225 tons. We also have two-shot capabilities, with 2500 hard-soft material combinations tested.

Extrusion and Co-extrusion.

Our capabilities include CAD/CAM-based electrical discharge (EDM) machining and co-extrusion with thermoplastic elastomers (TPE), PP thermoplastic and low-friction coatings. Extruder sizes range from 19mm to 90mm, and our die plates are in stock and ready to go.

Special Tool Highlights.

In addition to the tools and machines listed above, we’ve developed specialized equipment for producing various vehicle components. For example, we successfully developed flexible PVC compounds for use in injection molded automotive window encapsulation using a three-drop hot runner with interchangeable gates. As a result, we can eliminate processing issues in thin, high-gloss window sections such as gate blush, tiger stripes, flow marks, splay, weld lines and more.

We also have tools to support the development of glass run channels with hard backbones, flexible lips and abrasion-resistant coatings and can support both in-house, non-proprietary dies and Tier-1 production tool work.

Additional capabilities in our Centers of Excellence include:

• Exact color matching
• Rapid prototyping via 3D printing
• Design of experiments (DoE) analysis
• Certification to various OEM material approvals
• ISO/IEC 17025:2017 Certified Onsite Laboratory Services (American Association for Laboratory Accreditation)

Do you have an automotive application that can benefit from our Application Development Centers of Excellence? Contact us today.