Tailor-made felt technology for optimal acoustic performance

Autoneum is setting new standards in felt technology: Felt blanks for bulkhead and floor components in vehicles which are manufactured using the newly defined Rotating Injection Fiber process offer significant weight reductions together with improved acoustic performance. The IFP-R2 production system based on the Rotating Injection Fiber process has been newly designed according to the optimized manufacturing procedure and improved its environmental performance.

The Rotating Injection Fiber process is an innovative, patented procedure from Autoneum used for manufacturing tailor-made felt blanks for bulkhead and floor components in vehicles. In this process, the fiber mixture – the basic material for the felt blanks – is filled into a defined cavity located in a rotating drum. This results in robust intermediate products which are then molded into the shape required for the final product.

Among others, the advanced process leads to a reduction of sound bridges in the felt blanks. This improves products’ acoustic performance. At the same time, the weight of the felt blanks is reduced as the desired thickness can be exactly defined and the required shape precisely filled and cut to size.

With the optimization of this procedure, Autoneum also achieves an improved environmental performance in the production process – the material efficiency is now 95 percent, compared to 80 percent as seen previously. Excess material is recycled and then reused in the production process.

Autoneum has developed and patented its own IFP-R2 production system for implementing the Rotating Injection Fiber manufacturing procedure. IFP-R2 has already been successfully put into operation in Europe and will also be used at Autoneum sites in North America and Asia in future. The compact, mobile system can easily be transported as needed between different production sites.