Engineered Polyolefins for Non-Painted Automotive Interior Skins with Verv Low Gloss and Mar Resistance

摘要

The technical and environmental advantages of TPO for instrument panel skins have long been recognized in the automotive market. Most commercial TPO materials for this application have the disadvantage that they must be coated with lacquer or paint to provide sufficient scratch resistance and to maintain uniform gloss on the final thermoformed skin. A new family of thermoformable engineered polyolefin based materials has been developed by Solvay Engineered Polymers for use as thermoformable instrument panel skin. This new material is intended to be used without any coatings and may be used for both positive (grained during skin fabrication) and negative (grained in the mold tooling) forming processes. As a consequence of the engineered theological and morphological properties of the polyolefin materials, fabricated skins exhibit very good scratch resistance and uniformly low gloss after the thermoforming process. The melt strength characteristics of the material in the melt state allow for a much broader thermoforming process window than is normally observed with most TPO products. Side-by-side test data of un-painted experimental instrument panel skins show greatly improved durability relative to commercially used TPO skins.