Development of production costs of CFRP parts

The production cost of CFRP- parts is one of the most decisive decision gates for the usage of CFRP products in industry. Especially for mass production products, such as in the automotive sector, production costs are always important. As a result CFRP parts are often avoided, even though they show a better technical performance than the benchmark materials. Since 2012 the leading edge cluster MAI Carbon works on the topic of cost reduction for CFRP parts. More then 35 R&D projects were carried out. Most of them worked on the field of cost reduction. This publication summarizes some of the results and gives an overview of the significant developments in the field production costs. Towards the end of the cluster R&D project on one project was initiated to investigate the achieved results and evaluate the effects to the production costs of CFRP parts. The results of this project but also calculation in other projects show that a strong cost reduction of CFRP parts is possible by a reduction of the material prices and new production technologies. It has been demonstrated sound and transparent that costs of well under 20 e / kg part weight are possible and realistic in high volume production.