Vegetable fibres in automotive interior components

This paper gives a brief status of the state of the art of the use of plastic/vegetable fibre composite materials for interior car parts and the technologies to realise such parts (injection moulding, low pressure injection moulding, thermoforming, thermocompression and co-injection moulding). The development activity on composite plastic-wood materials to be used in the automotive sector performed by J.C.A. is also presented, in particular the research lines performed on several kinds of vegetable fibres (eucalyptus, jute, flax, kenaf) to be applied on semi-finished products: granules (short vegetable fibre) for injection moulding, and extruded sheets (long and short vegetable fibre) for thermoforming.