The purpose of this thesis work was to carry out initial studies on Scania’s possibility to have plastic rearview mirror glasses as that for example may reduce costs and problems for Scania’s customers and enable another design of the mirror assembly. It was performed by studying the legislative and Scania demands regarding rearview mirrors to write a test program, find and order plastic mirrors, and then perform the tests and evaluate the mirrors to see if they seem good enough for Scania’s trucks. A Scania technical regulation for rearview mirror glass was also written. The tested mirrors were a Scania glass mirror as reference, a PC mirror from Sabic, a PC and a PMMA mirror from Specchidea, a mirror from SMR automotive, an ABS mirror from Ficocipa/Renault, an ABS mirror from Ford and a PC plastic from Bayer and they were tested for scratch resistance, temperature variations, impact resistance, corrosion and chemical resistance in that order. If a sample did not pass a certain test, it was not subjected to the next one. Of all samples it was only the SMR mirror and the reference glass mirror that passed the first test (scratch resistance). The others became too scratched and were not tested further. The SMR and the glass mirror also withstood all the following tests very good, the SMR mirror was the best one of the tested mirrors. Probably the SMR mirror was the best one because many of the other mirrors did not seem to have been made for outdoor conditions and because it seemed to be the most modern mirror with a good abrasion resistant coating. It was concluded that there is a future for plastic mirror glasses, that it would be interesting to do more tests on the mirrors, for example a UV test and a distortion test, and to test more mirrors as a new generation of plastic mirror glass seem to be underway. It would also be interesting to know how much cheaper and lighter the whole mirror assembly can become by changing to plastic mirror glass, which weighs 68% less than a glass mirror.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:kth-33042 |
| Date | January 2011 |
| Creators | Alriksson, Kristofer |
| Publisher | KTH, Skolan för kemivetenskap (CHE) |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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