Automotive aluminum extrusion market grows

With Ford swapping steel for aluminum in its consumer and commercial truck body panels, lightweight sheet metal suppliers have received a lot of attention recently. But they’re not the only ones supporting metal replacement strategies. Many automotive structural components are transitioning from steel beams to aluminum extrusions as well, forcing automotive designers and engineers to learn more about the process.

RnR Market Research predicts a 7% compound annual growth rate for aluminum extrusions through 2019, mainly because of the expected increase in the automotive industry.

Norwegian aluminum company Sapa recently opened a $3 million laboratory in Troy, Michigan, to develop processes, products, and joining technologies to support automotive production.

Tolga Egrilmezer, Sapa executive vice president of strategy and business development; and Peter Hedman, director of Sapa’s North American Technical Center; sat down with Today’s Motor Vehicles during one of the company’s recent Profile Academies – training sessions for engineers who need to learn how aluminum extrusions can fit into modern designs – to discuss how the company supports the auto industry.

Today’s Motor Vehicles: Why open the Troy center now?

Tolga Egrilmezer: Globally, the fastest growing markets we see are in transportation – trucks, trailers, ships, trains, and certainly the automotive industry. These are our key growth areas, so we need to be close to these businesses.

Peter Hedman: Engineers, myself included, grew up learning how to design steel with very little formal education on aluminum, aluminum extrusion in particular. The pull is there from the engineering side. The increasing for desire for lightweight vehicles – we saw that earlier in Europe – is taking place in North America.

We’re wringing the neck of powertrain now, where gains are getting minimal and the complications are getting very high. But the chassis itself still leaves a lot of opportunities to get the weight out.

TMV: Many of the examples at the Profile Academy are of aluminum-intensive vehicles such as the Ford F-150, Acura NSX, Cadillac CT6, and Tesla Model S. Do you expect to see most new cars designed to use aluminum structures throughout their designs?

PH: We’re going to see some completely redesigned vehicles, but we’re seeing a lot of demand for bolt-on components, where OEMs can, with very little pain, swap in a lightweight component without redesigning a part – bumpers for example.

It’s a much bigger risk to convert your entire steel unit-body to aluminum if you don’t have a lot of experience with it. It’s easier to go with a bumper assembly to start.

TMV: Aluminum extrusions can be anything from a simple tube to complex pieces with multiple bends, angles, and holes. Which options are the most popular so far with automotive designers?

TE: Generally, if the part looks more complicated, it is. The level of cost and complexity varies quite a bit. We see the full gamut from profiles that have extremely complicated geometry – 8, 10, 12 holes in them with complex truss shapes – to the other end, thick, round rods for vibration control. We see those and everything between.

PH: There are a couple of different philosophies that OEMs are following as they work these issues out. Are we a welding company? Are we a company that bonds a car together? Are we a company that bonds and uses self-piercing rivets and a variety of different fastening systems?

At Ford, it’s hydroforming. They had some complex geometry that they needed to get into the rails. A lot of the structure is sheet, sandwiched around hydroformed tubes. For them, a round tube is how we supply it. It gets formed into a multi-dimensional profile.

TMV: General Motors, with the CT6, has put a lot of technology into welding (http://goo.gl/wybCGP).

PH: Exactly. They’re considering different profiles.

TMV: Like anything else in the auto industry, I assume that simple structures are less expensive than complex profiles?

PH: For the most part, but it’s not always that simple. The product that we make for Ford, even though it’s just a round tube, has an intensive amount of quality control, a huge amount of alloy development. It is not cheap by any means, just because the geometry is simple.

TMV: Aluminum extrusions are newer to the passenger car market, but they’re established in commercial truck trailers. How much truck expertise can Sapa apply to the automotive world?

PH: There are definitely techniques that cross over between the industries, but the markets are very different. The automotive industry has 100 years of intensive quality control and an escalation of zero-parts-per-million defect standards. Whereas the truck trailer side has 100 years of being run by small, family owned businesses.

TE: We do learn quite a bit from all of our markets. In Europe, freight and passenger rail is a big area of importance for us. We’ve developed systems for very long extrusions for rail cars, and that’s an expertise we’ve applied to truck trailers and something we can apply to certain automotive applications.

PH: From the trailer side, we have a team of engineers working on strength, rigidity, and corrosion resistance. Trailers get abused. They have forklifts going in and out of them all day, and the forklifts often stick their tines through the sides of the trailers. We’ve developed alloys that are very fracture resistant so the trailer can survive after the tines go through. Those alloys will definitely be attractive to automotive OEMs.

Sapa Group

www.sapagroup.com

About the author: Robert Schoenberger is the editor of TMV and can be reached at 216.393.0271 or rschoenberger@gie.net.