Italian carbon fibre composites group, ATR, has been working on the new Italian 'Micro' car, dubbed 'k200', which is made almost entirely from composite materials. The company specified Huntsman Advanced Materials' BM 5055 epoxy tooling board to build the models for ten carbon fibre moulds of the chassis, all the bodywork and interior trim.After the models were milled using the associated CAD data, several layers of carbon fibre and epoxy resin pre-impregnated tissue were manually laid on top of them, with special care being taken to ensure that the resulting composite structure remained void-less. An autoclave cure subsequently provides the required material strength and toughness. The whole composite structure is then placed in a nylon vacuum bag and autoclaved once more to compress all the tissue layers evenly. The physical properties of this tooling board were particularly suitable for our process, says ATR Group technical and operations manager, Giulio Strambi. Its high temperature and pressure stability are key requirements for the resin curing process, and its ease of machining and good surface finish following milling, allowed a drastic reduction in hand finishing. just to give an idea, it took about a month and a half to build the mould for the largest of the bodywork components measuring 1.7m x 1.0m x 0.8m. Another factor affecting ATR's choice of BM 5055 board was its high dimensional stability, which avoided the need to make additional cost and time consuming modifications to the model.Email: advanced_materials@huntsman.com