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By GARY S. VASILASH / Editor-In-Chief Sunroof Frame Goes Natural IAC has developed the materials and the process that allows the manufacture of price-competitive, natural sunroof frames. When you see the name "international" in a company's name, you can sometimes take it with a grain of salt, Salz, sel, or what-have-you. But that's most certainly not the case with International Automotive Components (IAC; iacgroup. com ), as the Tier One supplier, which is headquartered in Luxembourg, has 85 manufacturing facilities in 20 coun- tries, and if you add in its design, technical and commercial centers, that puts IAC in 22 countries. Yes, that's what "international" means. But this is not about grains of salt. Rather, it is about fbers, natural fbers, a combination of a hemp from European sources and kenaf from Bangladesh. Researchers at an IAC technology center In Ebersberg, Germany, not far from Munich, spent some four years working on the right combination of fbers and binder to create a material that they could apply to the construction of what is considered to be the frst roof frame made with natural fbers. Michael Behnke, product manager for Overhead Systems at IAC's Advanced Development Europe facility, explains that while there are some sunroof frames made with ABS, possibly including glass fbers, for the most part, the frames are produced with 0.7-mm steel, which requires painting or zinc chromating to protect it from the environment. And Fritz Schweindl, who is the director of Advanced Engineering for IAC, points out that sunroofs—both large and small—are fnding increased application in cars and crossovers, so they thought it important to fnd the ways and means to create an alternative, one that is signif- cantly lighter than the steel incumbent. As in up to 50 percent lighter than a conventional metal-reinforced steel sunroof frame. And so they created the IAC "EcoMat Hot " fber mat made with the aforementioned fbers, a mat that is treated with a water-based acrylic binder, Acrodur 950 L from BASF ( basf. com ). All in, the binder accounts, Behnke says, for 28 percent to 30 percent of the fnished part, with the natural fbers constituting the rest. IAC has been working with natural fbers for some 20 years, so they have developed a good understanding of how the mats need to be put together for various applications (they're involved in several applications, from trunk trims to door arm rests to glove box lids, although these applications use a thermoplastic binder, not a thermoset, as in the case of the roof frame). Another factor in the selection of hemp and kenaf—both of which are very fne fbers with the requisite properties including elasticity, tensile strength and fexural modulus— for this application is economic: as these are fbers that are grown, not pulled out of a vat, environmental variations can have a consequence on the market prices of the materials— changes on the order of 20 to 30 percent can be seen. The use of the two fbers helps protect them on the cost front. To produce the frames, strips of material are cut from the 50