Bean a good investment claims Johnson Controls

Johnson Controls is using soya bean-based polyurethane foam for auto interiors

Since their launch two years ago, the soyfoam seats have found a place on 11 vehicles platforms in North America. But there was a problem taking the eco-friendly seating globally — the fact that soya bean oil was not available in quite the same way worldwide.

So now JCI is giving some international agricultural flair to its plant-based urethane program.

In Asia, it will make urethane foam with about 5% content from palm oil, while European foams will use a combination of castor oil and canola oil. JCI is calling the foam ‘natural-oil polyols’ or ‘NOPs’, rather than the previous label of ‘soyfoam’.

“You want to be able to achieve the environmental aspect in other regions,” said Dan LaFlamme, product development manager for JCI’s Michigan-based interiors unit, during an interview at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit.

The palm oil blend will hit the market first, with a JCI facility in Malaysia set to begin production later this year. The castor and canola blends in Europe are still getting their final technical tweaks.

In North America, soya beans are a major crop typically used in animal feed, with soya oil a by-product, but it isn’t grown or processed in exactly the same way elsewhere, LaFlamme said. Transferring the technology from soy into other plant oil blends makes sense.

JCI is reconfiguring other parts of its seating offerings for automakers with its thin profile Synergy Seat which uses a glass filled polypropylene structural form encompassing the back and sides of the seat in place of wire and foam.

The company has shown the PP ‘Comfort Shell’ proposal before, but the structure was attached to a metal frame structure, which raised the price, LaFlamme said. For synergy, the company re-engineered the injection molded part to work with the same frame structure it uses on 32 different vehicle platforms. That high volume drives down production cost, and makes the shell and the thin seat a competitively priced product.

The PP combined with a lighter weight steel and aluminum structure and a high density thin urethane foam allows the company to cut up to 40% out of the seat’s cost, said Byron Foster, group vice president, global product centers. JCI is showing the seat to carmakers now for future production.

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