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In automotive production, fiber-reinforced resins will increasingly be used to replace metal materials. It is understood that the composite material made by melting and mixing polypropylene resin and long glass fiber has a beautiful appearance in addition to its light quality, and has reached a good balance between hardness and impact resistance. At present, the product has been applied to the uncoated car rear door interior.

Application of Polypropylene in Automotive Interior

Plastic plays an irreplaceable role in meeting the beauty, comfort, safety, anti-corrosion, lightweight and design freedom of automobiles. Polypropylene, as one of the five general plastics, can be modified by toughening, filling, reinforcing, blending and other modification methods to obtain new materials with different properties, and modified polypropylene materials have been widely used in automotive interiors.

For example, the dashboards currently used in automobiles can be divided into hard dashboards and semi-hard dashboards. Different models and different designs can have many material choices. Medium and high-end cars mostly use semi-rigid instrument panels. Polypropylene reinforced with 20% glass fiber can be used as the skeleton and air duct material of semi-rigid instrument panels due to its good rigidity. In addition, auto parts such as glove boxes, door guards, auxiliary instrument panels, column guards, seat guards, and parcel frame guards can all be made of modified polypropylene materials.

Mitsui Chemicals Rio Tinto Overseas Automotive Polyethylene Material Market

With the continuous development of synthetic technology, polypropylene (PP) resin is widely used in various fields such as automobiles, home appliances, pipes, packaging, medical equipment and so on, especially in the automotive industry, the demand for modified polypropylene materials is rising rapidly, and the market prospect is very promising.

At the end of May, Japan's Mitsui Chemical Co., Ltd. said it would continue to explore the overseas automotive materials market, especially the European market. The company will invest 5 billion yen (about US $45.5 million) in the Netherlands to build a new polypropylene plant for plastic raw materials for the production of car bumpers. It is understood that the annual production capacity of the new plant will reach 30000 tons of polypropylene, which is expected to be officially produced in June 2020. The new polypropylene plant will be Mitsui Chemical's first polypropylene compound production site in Europe in response to growing global demand from the automotive industry.

At the same time, Mitsui Chemicals will also invest 18.4 million euros to set up a subsidiary engaged in the production and operation of polypropylene advanced composite materials in the same region, and the products will be mainly sold to European automobile manufacturers. It is understood that Mitsui Chemicals' polypropylene resin sales rank second in the world. It has factories in 7 countries including Japan, India and the United States, but it does not have any direct business in Europe. Currently, it is mainly commissioned production. The launch of the subsidiary will be its first production activity in Europe.

With the deepening of automobile lightweight, the demand for high-performance resins with good heat resistance and impact resistance in Europe will increase significantly. Obviously, this is a promising market and a key area for Mitsui Chemical to further develop its business. Of course, Mitsui Chemicals will continue to invest in other regions to develop its business. For example, in Japan, China and the United States, Mitsui Chemicals intends to expand the production of glass fiber reinforced polypropylene materials, and is expected to complete the expansion plan by 2020. In addition, in the United States, Mitsui Chemicals is also building a thermoplastic elastomer plant in Ohio with an annual capacity of 60000 tons/year, which is expected to start production in October 2019.

Moreover, Mitsui Chemicals attaches great importance to the automotive materials market. This year, Mitsui Chemicals has invested 30.1 billion yen in the development of automotive materials and related mergers and acquisitions. As Mitsui Chemicals enters the European market, it is expected that by 2025, a synergy of 3 billion to 5 billion yen will be generated to obtain greater economic benefits.

Conclusion

In the past ten years, the application of plastics in automobiles has achieved tremendous development. Among the many plastic varieties used in automobiles, the development and application of various modified polypropylene materials in automobiles have increasingly become the focus of attention of the automotive industry and the plastics industry. Through a variety of modified processing methods, modified polypropylene materials can be obtained to meet the different functional requirements of various automotive parts, coupled with its excellent performance-price ratio, so that a variety of toughened, filled, reinforced polypropylene materials in the automotive industry has been widely used. This has deepened the development trend of automobile lightweight to a certain extent, and also accelerated the pace of the era of "replacing steel with plastic", which has a far-reaching impact on the entire automobile industry. It is also because of the progressive trend of automotive lightweight, making modified plastics ushered in new development opportunities.