New plastics and coatings are giving automotive engineers a wealth of options for interior design. These materials offer the promise of additional functionality beyond just decoration or passenger protection. For example, they can reduce overall vehicle weight, resist fingerprints, facilitate cleaning, and eliminate the need for painting or other costly finishing processes. Some materials can even self-heal minor scratches.
As exciting as these new materials may be, they must still meet OEM quality requirements. Ideally, the mechanical properties of the new material will be just as good, or better, than the existing material. However, it’s not uncommon for engineers to discover that one or more aspects of the new material are better than the original, while other characteristics are worse. For example, highly cross-linked, acrylate-based, UV-cured thin-film coatings are highly resistant to abrasion, but are brittle and have high shrinkage rates. To further complicate matters, the same coating, in the same thickness, will often behave differently on different substrates.