Velcro Car Parts ? Peel your car parts off, stick car parts back on ? Really ?
...So - you've just reversed your car into a tree, bending your bumper as you do so. No doubt, you're feeling a bit foolish, but once the initial annoyance with yourself subsides, you get to thinking - wouldn't it be great if you could just peel your old bent bumper off, and slip a new one on ? Well, maybe you're not thinking this way, but it appears that the Warwick Manufacturing group are. Engineers from the Warwick Manufacturing Group are developing a new technique that involves coating the surface of car parts such as bumpers and wing mirrors, with a surface of nanometre-sized “hooks and eyes”. The lead researcher of the project said "We were able to show that microscale and even nanoscale indentations were picked up and reproduced by the plastic surface. The idea was then born that if you could somehow engineer those surface to have the same sort of hooks and eyes as Velcro, it would be an ideal way of bonding surface together.” The project was awarded £60,000 by the Warwick Innovative Manufacturing Research Centre to develop the technique, and has received some initial interest from Jaguar Land Rover.
This report was compiled by Justin Woodcock on behalf of Find-a-Part - Car Parts Search Specialists since 1978.
