Research and Development

  • Components made from Cellasto®, Ultramid® and Elastoflex® E high-performance plastics make vehicles lighter
  • BASF and Fraunhofer IPMS CNT jointly develop electronic materials
  • Innovative production method improves drug solubility for many applications

Our customized high-performance plastics help automotive industry manufacturers reduce weight, thereby lowering fuel consumption. One current example is the new combination of Cellasto® and fiber-reinforced Ultramid®, which allows top mounts to be made entirely out of plastic for the very first time. Ultramid® is also the material used in the world’s first plastic transmission crossbeam in the rear axis of vehicles. Both solutions save around 25% in weight compared with the usual versions made of die-cast aluminum. As an important element in the new lightweight roof of Daimler AG’s smart fortwo, our Elastoflex® E polyurethane foam system makes this component 30% lighter than in the previous model.

BASF and Fraunhofer IPMS Center for Nanoelectronic Technologies (CNT) in Dresden, Germany, have joined forces to work on innovative materials for the semiconductor industry. BASF has installed a facility for electrochemical metal deposition at CNT, where electronic materials will be developed in pilot tests for customers in the semiconductor industry. The tailor-made production processes will then be ready for immediate customer use, saving costs and reducing development time for new microchip technologies.

In collaboration with researchers from the universities EPFL (Switzerland), Harvard and Yale (United States), we have developed a process that improves the bioavailability of ingredients in various applications, such as making the uptake of medicines in the human body more efficient. The innovative supersonic spray-drying process creates nanoparticles of drugs with improved solubility. Without such processing, drug molecules would arrange themselves into crystals, which are difficult to dissolve. The method can be used for both organic and inorganic substances and is therefore suitable for numerous applications, especially in pharmacology, the food industry and crop protection.