Tailor-made for better acoustics

Nonwoven felt blanks for bulkhead and floor components in vehicles are being manufactured by a new rotating injection fibre process developed at Autoneum in Switzerland.

This results in products with both significant weight reductions and improved acoustic performance.

Autoneum’s IFP-R2 production system based on the rotating injection fibre process has been newly designed for optimised manufacturing and improved environmental performance. In the process, a fibre mixture is filled into a defined cavity in a rotating drum. This results in robust intermediate products which are then moulded into the shape required for the final product.

Among other things, the process leads to a reduction of ‘sound bridges’ in the felt blanks and at the same time, the desired thickness can be exactly defined and the required shape precisely filled and cut to size.

With the optimisation of this procedure, Autoneum has also achieved an improved environmental performance – material efficiency is now 95%, compared to 80% previously and excess material is recycled and reused in the production process.

IFP-R2 has already been successfully put into operation in Europe and will now be used at Autoneum sites in North America and Asia. The compact, mobile system can be easily transported between different production sites as required.