Ford's all-women team developing recyclable car parts

Angela Mulholland, CTV.ca News Staff

Date: Sunday May. 15, 2011 6:56 AM ET

Source: ctv.ca/CTVNews/SciTech/

The Ford Research Biomaterials Group (from left): Dr. Cynthia Flanigan, Laura Beyer, Dr. Debbie Mielewski, Dr. Ellen Lee, Angela Harris.

Car seats made with soy-based foam. Plastic interiors reinforced with wheat straw. Soundproofing made with old jeans.

These are just some of the innovations of Ford's biomaterial team, a group of engineers researching ways to create car parts that are environmentally friendlier and less petroleum-based.

The five members on the team have a number of awards adorning their lab shelves. They also happen to be all women, working in an industry that is still very much male-dominated.

All five are chemical or mechanical engineers by training. Between the five of them, they have three PhDs and five master's degrees. They also have 10 children, a dog or two -- and a tendency to talk a lot.

"In terms of work, it's maybe an advantage and disadvantage that we're very verbal," Ford biomaterials team member, Dr. Ellen Lee, tells CTV.ca. "In some ways, it helps a lot for us to understand where things are at and make sure we have good dynamics working together. But on the other hand, we talk a lot."

Ford is proud of this unique team and their accomplishments. But Lee admits she and her colleagues bristle a bit at being dubbed "the Material Girls" and the "Bio Babes" by their colleagues. "We're a little bit sensitive of that. Because we don't want to diminish the research we do by being labelled in this way. But on the other hand, we do think it's important that young girls and women see that there are women in these types of research and engineering positions," she says.

Being female in a male-dominated industry hasn't been a challenge for the group. But in the past, they struggled to promote the use of renewable and recycled products in car parts.

When her team came together 11 years ago, no one was interested in biomaterial car parts, Lee says. Oil was cheap, plastic was widely available and environmentalism in the car industry meant fuel efficiency, not car parts made out of hemp.

But a lot of that has changed. "Ten or 11 years ago, it wasn't popular to be green. So it was hard to get our engineers within the company interested in trying to switch over and look at these materials," she says. "But through our research, we were able to overcome a lot of the early hurdles. And now, people are very interested and we're starting to get pull from our engineers for more bio-content. There's an overall desire to be more environmentally friendly. It's in our culture now."

The team's first big accomplishment was developing a soy-based foam for use in its car seats. The foam, made with oil of soybeans, is now in use for all of Ford's vehicles. The team is also working to develop plastics that aren't reinforced with the fiberglass commonly used in polypropylene vehicle interiors. While fiberglass isn't made with oil, its fibres are heavy, which adds to the vehicle's weight and fuel use, Lee explains.

"It's also very energy-intensive to produce fibreglass. You're essentially melting sand to get these glass fibres, so you can imagine that takes a lot of heat," she says Replacing the fibreglass with such natural, renewable fibres as hemp, sisal, or coconut coir could make the vehicle just a little bit more fuel-efficient. The team has already found success in a polypropylene made in part with the straw from wheat plants -- straw that would otherwise be thrown away.

The resulting material is now used to create a bin on the passenger doors of the Ford Flex, but Lee hopes it can soon be used in more interior applications and in other vehicle models as well. The team is also researching a synthetic rubber that would use the milky-white substance found in dandelion stems and roots. The resulting rubber would be used to help improve the impact strength of plastics and could be used in floor mats as well as interior trim. "We also are looking at using old jeans to make cotton shoddy which is used for sound deadening to have a quieter ride," Lee says.

Bio-based materials do pose some challenges. The resulting products have to be recyclable and biodegradable, but they also have to be durable so they last the lifetime of the vehicle.

The team's ultimate goal, Lee says, it to make the entire interior of all of Ford's cars and trucks more recyclable -- everything from the cup holders to the engine parts to the underbody.

"Most of the things you touch in the vehicle's interior are plastic or resin-based materials. And a large portion of those things could be polypropylene with natural fibre reinforcements such as hemp or flax. So the potential is big," she says.

"In 10 years, I'm hoping that most of those things inside the vehicle that you can touch will either have recycled content or renewable content -- or both."