Companies all over the world seem hell-bent on bringing carbon fiber and its weight and strength advantages into the hands of the everyday motorist.
After Ford’s display of a prototype CFRP bonnet earlier this week, Australian-based company Carbon Revolution launched the CR9, the world’s first one-piece production carbon fiber wheel.
Carbon Revolution says that this is the result of “nearly a decade” of research and development. The benefits in weight and rigidity have been established both by its own testing as well as with premium European OEMs.
Company CEO Jake Dingle says that the carbon wheel is not only 40-50 percent lighter compared to conventional aluminum wheels, but in testing, it has also proved that it exceeds OEM standards.
“Thanks to the laws of physics, the outcome is a performance step change of breathtaking magnitude”, said Dingle, who added, “Drivers will experience a significantly improved vehicle”.
Brett Gass is Carbon Revolution’s engineering director as well as one of its founding members. He has been involved in the project right from the start and in the past decade, he and his team have used a development strategy similar to those used by NASA and the Department of Defense.
Gass says that carbon fiber wheels are the next major evolution in automotive as well as aerospace wheel development.
“Creating a composite wheel that is made entirely in one piece from continuous fibers is particularly challenging given the significant geometric complexities”, Gass explained. “We have successfully developed an architecture that optimizes the outstanding properties of continuous carbon fibers through the complex range of operational loads that are seen on a vehicle.”
Fitting the CR9 to existing vehicles can improve fuel consumption by 2-4 percent and reduce CO2 emissions accordingly. Moreover, aerodynamic wheel designs can increase efficiency up to 5 percent, and a full integration, in cooperation with the vehicle manufacturer, can yield an improvement of 6 percent or more, according to the company.
Carbon Revolution says its radical design meets all known OEM and Certification Body requirements, including SAE 2530, TUV German Aftermarket and German OEM AK-LH 08 standards.
The carbon wheels are initially available in sizes 19x8.5 & 19x12 and are designed to mount directly on Porsche’s 911. The company says they are compatible with factory tire pressure monitoring systems, adding that in the following months, a wider range of sizes and fitments will be released on the market.
By Andrew Tsaousis
14 Comments:
Andrew, you should get your facts straight.. carbon fiber wheels exist for at least a few years now - both one piece and multi-piece.
"Weds Sport" CF rims are available since 2007 and even Carbon Revolution did some wheels for some supercar a few years back.
I thought koenigsegg was first?
http://www.koenigsegg.com/latest-news/koenigsegg-reinvents-the-wheel/
What about additional performance improvements by virtue of lesser rotating mass? Would love to see some 0-60 time comparisons!
Reducing unsprung weight is the most important kind of weight to reduce for any performance vehicle. Less wheel mass always means the suspension is better able to keep the tire in contact with the road as well as making direction changed far easier. Cutting wheel weight by half can change the handling characteristics of a car dramatically for the better, doing so on a sport bike or race bike creates improvements in performance that are almost unbelievable. Gyroscopic effect is what makes directional changes particularly difficult at high speed, the lighter the wheel the less force necessary to accomplish the task.
The issue with ANY high-end rim is that you have to have the right people work on them. Change a tire on these rims with Billy Bob at the helm and cringe at the results (basically, you'll be purchasing a costly new rim). It's trailer time when a flat occurs so that you can take your expensive automobile and rims to a place who can handle both with kid gloves. BTW, love the rims!
I like the deep surface version. I don't know whether the really are the first, because Koenigsegg has already made a carbon wheel for the Agera R. But great job, anyway!
Interesting. What do they mean by "conventional aluminum wheels"? Do they mean OEM alloy wheels? What about compared to some of the more well known lightweight wheel designs, like the Volk Racing TE37 wheels? And how much do these Carbon Revolution wheels weigh exactly?
The 19x8.5" CR9 wheel weighs 15.2 lbs while the 19x12" weighs 17.8 lbs. Price is about $15,000 a set.
This may be a cool idea, but if carbon wheels go mainstream and reduce in price to where the everyday driver can afford them, think of how curb rash will destroy the structural integrity of the wheel leading to premature failure. I work with composites like carbon and kevlar. Their strength is only in one direction. In the other direction its fragile. I'll stick to metal wheels. Metal will always be stronger in all aspects.
uh... ya your right... i smell a lawsuit.
Not sure what kind of carbon fiber you work with, but for more than a decade now carbon fiber has been layered and woven in multiple directions, to compensate for just that weakness, and obviously they've been very successful, otherwise wheels like these, as well as bicycle frames and various other loadbearing structures wouldn't work.
And I believe there has been ongoing research now for some time in combining carbon fiber with various ceramics and nano materials, which should eventually result in a composite hard enough light enough and tough enough to render current aluminum and magnesium alloys almost entirely obsolete, we shall see.
before this wedsport from japan also designed carbon rims
Not so sure about that. If they are so great why doesn't F1 use this type of material in the rims instead of magnesium? Also Carbon bike frames have been well known to crack. It's one thing to have a failure in race conditions where you understand the risks, and another to have a failure in consumer applications. If carbon fibre fails (and everything made of matter fails at some point) it's not subtle but catastrophic in nature. Steel / alloy rims will continue to be used in street application long after our lifetimes for one good reason, low cost and aversion to catastrophic failure. Only a serious idiot would use carbon fibre rims on a street car driven every day.
Being extremely light weight and also for their due diligence carbon fiber is now extensively used in the the production of heavy automobiles as a necessary measure for weight reduction..Interesting blog post,having great focus on large usage of carbon fiber in automobile industry..
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