'We can offer 11-14% weight reduction through lightweighting techniques in glass': Rahul Nikhanj

When it comes to lightweighting technology for vehicles, glass is usually not the first thing that comes to mind. However, more than 30% of the vehicular space is usually taken up by glass.

When it comes to weight part of glass, conventional vehicles add 50 kg, but with increased use of glass with features such as sunroofs, the weight of glass can increase by up to 70kg per vehicle, which is about 4-5 percent of the gross vehicle weight," Rahul Nikhanj Head, Projects and Production Technology, Asahi India Glass added.

Speaking at the Day 2 of Autocar Professional's lightweighting conference, he said, "We can offer 11-14% weight reduction through lightweighting techniques in glass, he added. The thickness of the glass is reducing from a conventional 3.2mm temperlite, to 2.8, and now we see that the trend is moving towards adopting even 2.5mm and 2.6 mm of glass, Rahul noted, which will give 11% additional weight reduction without compromising on its strengths. Globally, there are also developments where the inner layer of laminates are being tried at 1mm of thickness. 

"As we go thinner, there is a tendency for the vehicle NVH to increase, but there are technologies available that can compensate to the reduction in NVH by either adding thinner laminates in doorlites, and replacing tempererd sunroofs with laminted ones, or by adding acoustics interlayers in laminates. There is a possibility of reducing noise close to 40% to the scale of sound transmission loss in audible range," he mentioned.