SABIC in India

Select Language Afrikaans Albanian Arabic Armenian Azerbaijani Basque Belarusian Bulgarian Bengali Catalan Chinese (Simplified) Chinese (Traditional) Croatian Czech Danish Dutch English Estonian Filipino Finnish French Galician Georgian German Greek Gujarati Haitian Creole Hebrew Hindi Hungarian Icelandic Indonesian Irish Italian Japanese Javanese Kannada Khmer Korean Latvian Lithuanian Macedonian Malay Maltese Marathi Nepali Norwegian Persian Polish Portuguese Punjabi Romanian Russian Serbian Slovak Slovenian Spanish Swahili Swedish Tamil Telugu Thai Turkish Ukrainian Urdu Vietnamese Welsh Yiddish

This is a collection of articles archived for the excellence of their content. Additional information may please be sent as messages to the Facebook community, Indpaedia.com. All information used will be gratefully acknowledged in your name.

R&D centre, Bengaluru

2019/ Noryl GTX: resin-metal hybrid

Akhil George, Dec 4, 2019 Times of India

Some of the work done at SABIC’s R&D centre, Bengaluru
From: Akhil George, Dec 4, 2019 Times of India

Developing plastic, or resin, that is as strong and resistant as metal has been a long-term quest. If one can do it, then there are enormous advantages. In the automotive industry, it can help lower the weight of the vehicle, while maintaining the integrity of the structure.

It’s work that the Saudi Arabian petrochemicals company Sabic has been involved in, including in its large R&D centre in Bengaluru. And the effort has made significant advances. The Bengaluru centre, alongside other Sabic centres, has produced a resinmetal based hybrid solution called Noryl GTX resin that is lighter and just as sturdy as the metals generally used.

“You don’t normally associate plastic with high temperatures. But we have developed polymers that can work in very high temperatures (as when a car is painted) and which are replacing traditional metals,” says the company’s regional head for South East Asia, Australia & New Zealand, Janardhanan Ramanujalu.

“Our resin combines with steel to form a very efficient energy-absorption crash-box structure. It cuts the weight by upto 30% and can be compared to high-strength steel and maintains the required level of crash-worthiness,” he says.

The $45-billion Sabic – which became a subsidiary of Saudi Arabian oil company Saudi Aramco earlier this year – is the third largest diversified petrochemicals company in the world. Its R&D centre in Bengaluru was built at an initial cost of $100 million and is equipped with everything from an electron microscope to high-tech weathering labs to test the wear and tear of products when exposed to the elements. The centre, which has 300 engineers, mostly chemical engineers and material scientists, files around 70 patents a year. Globally the company annually files around 400.

“The application design team at the Bengaluru centre collaborates with global customers in designing and optimising the Noryl GTX resin structures which are moulded over onto the steel skeleton of vehicles. These novel light-weight designs help car structures absorb impact energy (if there’s an accident),” says Rajeshwer Dongara, head of the Bengaluru site.

The Bengaluru team specialises in conceptualising the designs and tuning the designs based on vehicle type and vehicle styling using advanced computer-aided predictive engineering tools.