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National AUTO21 Funding Supports ‘Green’ Cars
Car bumpers, running boards to be made from crop composites developed at U of G
Automobiles with bumpers and running boards made from composites of agricultural crops such as corn and wheat are closer to hitting the open road. A team of researchers — including two from U of G — has received $620,000 to create “green” car parts from biofibres and bioplastics.
Funding for the project, which is led by Prof. Amar Mohanty, Plant Agriculture, and Mohini Sain of the University of Toronto, comes from AUTO21, part of the national Networks of Centres of Excellence program, and from industry partners. The U of G project is one of 20 nationwide benefiting from a new $10-million investment announced last month.
Mohanty and Sain will be creating car-part prototypes from a “green” plastic and natural and biobased fibres. The project also involves U of G engineering professor Manju Misra, Chul Park of the University of Toronto, John Kadla of the University of British Columbia and Bohuslav Kokta of Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières.
The goal is to develop a “greener” car bumper and running board, substituting renewable and recyclable engineered composites for petroleum-based materials currently used in the automotive industry.
“Biomaterials use less energy, which reduces greenhouse gas emissions substantially and will further reduce our dependence on petroleum,” says Mohanty. “It will also help provide additional uses and new markets for the agriculture and manufacturing industries.”
The prototypes will be engineered in U of G’s Bioproducts Discovery and Development Centre, which opened last fall. Here researchers are engineering new industrial crops and biomass that can be turned into green composite materials and exploring their many uses, from car parts and building materials to sustainable packaging. They’re also studying innovative ways to develop biofuels from biomass.
The centre is directed by Mohanty, who holds the Premier’s Research Chair in Biomaterials and Transportation. He says the overall goal of this project and the centre is to find new innovations that will facilitate the transition to a biobased economy.
“To be globally competitive, Canada needs to explore new eco-friendly materials that can reduce reliance on petrochemicals and potentially provide a strong foundation in renewable resource-based biomaterials for greening the manufacturing sector.”