Car engines: the next frontier for the plastics industry?

Plastic doesn't have much of a time of it in popular sentiment. That much maligned substance of which so much of our lives is now made is synonymous much more with cheap-and-nastiness and choking dolphins than amazingness. But it is amazing stuff, mark our words. Much more amazing than most of us realise.

For one thing, plastic is not a single substance. Plastic is countless in varieties and infinitely variable in its qualities, from the glassy brittleness of a Ferrero Rocher box to the flexibility of string, from the gossamer delicacy of a freezer bag to the unyielding strength of the carbonfibre reinforced varieties used in countless industrial applications and beyond.

Twenty-five years after plastics engineer Ned Steinberger ran his pickup truck over the neck of his radical headless electric bass guitar prototype to find it didn't even go out of tune, Boeing is well on the way to launching a commercial airliner made almost entirely of plastics (okay, the Dreamliner is as much overdue as it is vaunted, and that is due to a few structural strength issues around the joints, but you know what I mean...).

Now, with a building imperative among car makers to match strength with lightness, plastic might be stepping up to face its next big challenge: making up those primary constituent parts of an internal combustion engine normally reserved for cast iron and aluminium and alloys. Namely, the block and the cylinder head.

In this, it has a staunch long-term ally in US engineer Matti Holtzberg, who's been working on the concept for four decades. To no avail so far, despite the successes he's had with prototype engines and parts since the 1980s, even in the high-stress environment of motor racing. Until now, the mainstream auto industry, famous for its riskophobic conservatism, hasn't seen cause for interest.

But the urge to crack down on weight is gaining power, and one of the main carriers of weight in a conventional vehicle is its engine. Which is why ears are starting to prick up at Holtzberg's claims that plastics deliver a 30-35 per cent weight advantage over aluminium.

The New York Times reports he's signed a deal with Texan chemicals giant Huntsman Corporation. The deal and its timing could give the idea the fillip it needs -- Huntsman employs 12,000 and turns over US$10 billion a year, much of it supplying auto parts.

Ever since he recast a 2.3-litre Ford Pinto four in composites 30 years ago, Holtzberg and his company Polimotor have proved repeatedly there's no reason plastics can't be used to this depth in internal combustion engines.

That engine used metals for the cams, the crank and the combustion chamber surfaces -- the piston crowns and cylinder liners. But the rest was plastic -- the piston skirts and connecting rods, the block, much of the cylinder head, the oilpan, pretty much the lot.

His next version was good for 225kW -- well over twice the power of the standard Ford mill. It weighed just 69kg, down from the 188 of the original.

In the mid-1980s, Holtzberg put a Polimotor engine using sponsor Amoco's Torlon plastic resin in a Lola car for the International Motor Sports Association's Camel Lights series with considerable success. That is, the only problem the team suffered in half a dozen races stemmed from a broken connecting rod sourced from elsewhere.

It was enough to attract a cover story in Popular Science and knocks on the door from Ford. To no effect in the end. "Ford was technically interested," Holtzberg told New York Times writer Don Sherman. "The Popular Science article gave them plenty of free publicity, but they actually contributed nothing to the Polimotor project."

Now, with climate change shaking the industry out of its complacency and many a big old name landing on its backside in the financial crisis with sufficient force to crack its mind open, the plastic engine's time might be here.

Huntsman Corporation advanced materials VP James Huntsman hopes so. "We realise that supplanting proven processes is a long and difficult challenge," he said in a statement. "We're convinced that the time is right for a composite engine."

Read the latest Carsales Network news and reviews on your mobile, iPhone or PDA at www.carsales.mobi