BMW Motorrad Carbon Fibre Swingarm Wins Innovation Award

BMW Motorrad has won the 2018 JEC Innovation Award in the Sports and Leisure category for the development and manufacture of a rear swingarm made of carbon fibre. The JEC Group is the world's leading specialist organisation in composite material development and manufacture. The award-winning swingarm from BMW is of a modular design, made of carbon-fibre and additional reinforcement materials. This allows the swingarm to be used for different demands, using a single injection mould. And despite it using carbon fibre, the design is scalable and has reduced costs to make it affordable to be used in a wide variety of motorcycles.

The swingarm project was intended to develop a system to allow mass production of carbon fibre in structural components. The project was sponsored by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research as part of the leading-age cluster MAI-Carbon. The aim of the project, involving seven partners from industry and research, was to develop a process that enabled the cost-effective, volume production use of carbon fibre composite materials (CFP) in structural components subject to high levels of continuous stress.

For the carbon fibre swingarm, it was possible to establish a cost-efficient manufacturing process suitable for large-scale production of injection mould components made of carbon fibre reinforced plastic with carbon fibre tape reinforcements.

Project Manager Elmar Jager explained, "We opted for chassis components under continuous load since the requirements involved are especially demanding. While car chassis parts are concealed, the visible motorcycle rear swingarm was ideal for our project since the forces at work are immediately evident. Our production technique uses CFP in the form of high-strength endless fibres where this is required by the stress pattern, while an injection mould part with short CFP recycling fibres is used where the stress levels are not as high. In this way, we developed a cost-efficient design that can be scaled according to requirements by inserting endless fibres with varying levels of strength in the same tool."

"These were the points that impressed the international jury. The insights we gained from this motorcycle component are equally valuable from the point of view of car development and can be applied accordingly."

The BMW Group uses lightweight construction in both automobiles and motorcycles, applying an intelligent combination of different materials including carbon fibre as a particularly important element. The latest example from BMW Motorrad was the HP4 RACE, where the entire main frame was made of carbon fibre reinforced plastic produced by means of an industrial RTM process. In 2017 the carbon fibre frame of the HP4 RACE opened a whole new chapter in motorcycle chassis construction, combining optimum technical qualities, uniform manufacturing quality and cost efficiency for the first time.

So far, the carbon fibre swingarm has not been introduced on any production motorcycle, but expect BMW Motorrad to introduce an updated HP4 RACE with the new swingarm.