Automotive - Products & Services

Pilkington Automotive makes a wide range of automotive glazings for new vehicles and for replacement markets, offering full systems capability to customers, from initial design to final product. Pilkington Automotive products include solar control glass for passenger comfort, glass heating systems to control condensation and icing, security glazing, and glazing systems, including encapsulations, extrusions, and components such as rain sensors, hinges and clips, added after basic manufacturing.

The Group aims to provide a full range of glazing solutions on a global basis to its automotive customers, drawing heavily on its advanced technology, continuous improvement and standardisation activities.

Just as in buildings, glass today is an integral part of a vehicle’s body and fulfils many functions. Design trends point to still greater usage of glass in the future; tighter tolerances, yet deeper and more complex curves. The glass manufacturer must be able to control very closely the pattern of temperatures in the glass throughout the shaping process if overall shape, optical quality and stress patterns are to be achieved consistently.

Utilising its global R&D and global account management structure, Pilkington Automotive's marketfocused approach to development of products and services ensures that it delivers the glazing solutions its customers want, in a timely fashion to the appropriate regions.

Design Facilities

The growing complexity of glazings has increased the need for integrating simulation within the shaping processes. Pilkington Automotive is recognised as a leader in the development and use of computer simulation for advanced glazing technology, providing customers with the best possible glazing solutions with which to achieve their styling intent.

Pilkington Automotive’s computer simulation centre team predicts the optical properties of a particular shape of windscreen, how closely any of the bending processes will achieve the required shape and tolerances, and how difficult manufacturing challenges may be overcome. This virtual reality product development reduces both tooling and manufacturing costs and dramatically reduces the time between design and manufacture. Pilkington Automotive simulation techniques have been empirically tested and shown to give excellent correlation with what happens in practice and continuous benchmarking ensures ongoing improvements.

Pilkington Automotive has wide-ranging experience in design integration, where Pilkington engineers work side by side with customers to achieve the optimum design for function and manufacture. Involvement of Pilkington Automotive personnel at the very earliest stage in the design of the vehicle helps the customer identify potential manufacturing or design problems, thereby avoiding expensive redesign at a later stage. It also ensures that glasses meet legislative requirements for optics and enables Pilkington Automotive to recommend benchmark styling modifications leading to more costeffective products and other glazing systems (e.g. encapsulation and extrusion) design. Data is transferred between Pilkington Automotive and its customers electronically, avoiding the need for drawings and physical fixtures in the design of new glazings.

Glass Shaping

Numerous market factors affect glazing design and performance, including cost reduction, tighter tolerances, high optical quality, design complexity and weight considerations. To meet these stringent market requirements, Pilkington Automotive continues to develop and invest in leading-edge glass shaping and fabricating technology. Changes in styling and the need for lighter, thinner glazings to reduce weight are stretching manufacturing processes to their limits. Pilkington Automotive maintains an extensive programme of process development to keep abreast of the latest design trends. For instance, new styling requirements for windscreens that extend into the roof of the vehicle, or wrap around into the side of the vehicle, demand significant extension of both gravity sag and press bending technologies. Pilkington Automotive has developed Advanced Sag and Press Bending processes to secure its position as a supplier of the most advanced products.

In support of its manufacturing processes, Pilkington Automotive is continually developing powerful new inspection techniques, capable of analysing every aspect - curvature, optical distortion, edge quality, and scratches - as the component takes shape. These systems will provide real time feedback for process control to increase yields and so reduce costs.

Glazing Systems

The task of the glazing supplier does not end when the glass is shaped. Pilkington Automotive is a world leader in the design and manufacture of a variety of glazing systems, each designed to simplify the glazing installation process. As well as the efficiencies provided at the vehicle assembly plant, these modular product solutions are also viewed by the VMs as a practical way of enhancing both a vehicle’s styling and aerodynamics.

Encapsulation, or moulding, provides a modular glass assembly with a multifunctional gasket around the rim of the glass, utilising injection-moulding technology. This gasket can provide many features from a single moulding process, including an aesthetic finish to the glazing, water management, integrated attachment pins or clips, and mounting brackets or hinges.

Alternative sealing systems involve the use of a robotic extrusion process to apply a seal or attachment mechanism to the periphery of the glass.

Glazing systems also encompasses the ‘assembly’ activity where various hardware attachments, designed to locate correctly the glass within the vehicle, are fixed to the glass, either mechanically or by the use of adhesive technology.

With 20 years glazing systems experience behind it, Pilkington Automotive is a market leader in all of these technologies, in terms of both product and process development and global market share.

Solar Control Glazing

The last decade has seen significant improvements in the design and application of solar control glazings in vehicles. The major drivers are passenger comfort, minimising the degrading effects of the sun’s radiation on interior trims and fabrics, and improving fuel consumption by lowering the load on the vehicle’s air-conditioning unit. Additionally, vehicle styling is impacted by the choice of solar control glazing, from dark tints in the rear of the vehicle, to the differentiated colour of infrared reflective windscreens.

Solar radiation is partly reflected, partly transmitted and partly absorbed by glazing, the degree of each depending on the glazing fitted. Body-tinted glasses can selectively absorb the sun’s energy, whilst glazings with specially designed coatings can be used to reflect solar radiation.

Absorbing Solar Control

Pilkington Automotive has long been a market leader in body-tinted glass compositions. Optikool™, EZ-KOOL® and UV Cut are green, optimised solar absorbing glasses, providing significant improvement to occupant comfort. The products, designed for the European, North American and Japanese markets respectively, reduce the heat entering through a vehicle’s glazed area by approximately 20 per cent when compared to a car equipped with standard tinted glass.

Pilkington Automotive is also a market leader in the development of dark tinted automotive glazings, and today produces two such suites of glasses, both of which provide significant benefits to solar control, privacy and overall vehicle styling. Due to vehicle safety legislation, requiring adequate light to provide clear driver vision, use of these dark tinted glazings is restricted to rear passenger compartments and to roof glazings.

The Galaxsee™ glass suite is a major player in the privacy glazing segment. Originally developed for the North American market, it now finds global applications. This grey glass has a low light transmission (11-28 per cent depending on thickness selection) and an even lower transmitted energy value. It reduces the transmitted heat to the interior of the vehicle by approximately 65 per cent in comparison to an optimised green glass used in the front of the vehicle. It also prevents more than 95 per cent of ultraviolet radiation from entering the passenger compartment. Consequently, this glass is increasingly the choice for ‘dark tail’ SUVs and MPVs, in addition to being suitable for roof glazing applications.

Sundym™ and the Legart range are a suite of neutralised green privacy glasses that blends with the green front door glass to allow both a design choice and an improvement to solar loading. The Sundym™ glass has a light transmission in the range 26-45 per cent over a 3-5 mm glass thickness range In a vehicle equipped with Sundym™, the heat entering the rear of the vehicle is reduced by 45 per cent when compared to that at the front of the car.

The market continues to adopt these glasses due to the valuable combination of both physical and aesthetic benefits.

Reflective Solar Control

Pilkington Automotive possesses the technology and capability to deliver a coated windscreen product that reflects more than 30 per cent of the sun’s energy (more than five times that of a standard glass). This particularly benefits the new generation of vehicles that are commonly designed with larger glass areas. Significantly, the Pilkington coating technique is advantageous in the pursuit of improved vehicle styling, as it can deliver highly complex shapes with exceptional optical quality.

Pilkington Automotive also offers a solar-reflective product, Pilkington Siglasol™ utilising infra red reflecting film within the laminate. Reflective glazings have now been successfully integrated into large area rooflights. This application is the most significant for solar control in a vehicle, as the sun’s radiation is minimised, irrespective of the vehicle’s direction of travel.

Laminated Sideglazings

For the past 25 years, the standard glazing constructions for automotive vehicles have been laminated glass for the windshield and toughened glass for the side and rear glazings. Over the next ten years it is expected that as new car models are introduced, the type of glazings used in the side windows (sidelights) of cars will move from toughened glass to laminated glass. The trend to fit laminated sidelights started in Europe, but there is now global interest with US and Japanese vehicle manufacturers launching models fitted with side laminates. The move to laminated side and rear glazings represents a turning point for advanced vehicle design opportunities and is more significant than the volume change from toughened to laminated windshields in 1970.

Extensive consumer market research has confirmed that consumers are very interested in laminated sidelights and prepared to pay a premium to have them fitted to the vehicle.

The consumer sees benefits in two areas:

Security - Personal security and reduction in theft from cars
Comfort - Solar control improvement
- Reduction in extraneous noise
- Greater than 95 per cent reduction in UV entering the vehicle through the side glazings

Laminated sidelights have a similar construction to laminated windshields, namely a plastic interlayer sandwiched between two glass plies. In order to meet door slam tests, both plies need to be semi-toughened to give additional strength to the glazing. Currently most products are 2.1/0.76/2.1mm, 1.8/0.76/1.8 mm and 1.6/0.76/1.6 mm construction. The trend to lighter weight glazing means that an overall 4 mm make up is becoming critical as laminates are adopted on lower segment vehicles. Pilkington Automotive researchers have made it possible to supply high quality 4 mm laminated sidelights in simple and complex geometry to tight tolerances.

Besides its intrinsic benefits identified above, laminated glazing also offers an opportunity to create advanced glazings with additional features, such as coatings or wire heating for de-misting, or modified interlayers (e.g. solar control, colours, acoustic enhancement).

The additional cost of laminated side glazings is offset by the above opportunities which can enable the car manufacturer to customise the vehicle and make it more attractive and desirable to the car buyer.

Today’s vehicle designers expect the glazing to perform as more than merely a window. They want added functionality.

Integrated Antennas

With the ever increasing demands of global communication systems, Pilkington Automotive can design and manufacture fully integrated antenna systems either on the glass surface, or inside the glazing construction. This approach allows the VM to move away from traditional rod-based antennas, which not only improves the styling and aesthetic appeal of the vehicle but also removes the threat of vandalism. The use of on-glass antennas is firmly established in Japan, a known pacesetter for electronic solutions, and is now increasing in Europe and North America. Considerable expertise exists inside Pilkington Automotive to take advantage of this growing trend.

Instrument Display

Head Up Display (HUD) systems have long been used in military aircraft to project information into the pilot’s field of vision. Pilkington Automotive has successfully modified this technology so that it can be used in road vehicles at a cost acceptable to the market. Interest in HUD technology is continually growing as people demand ever more functionality in their vehicles.

Water Management

Pilkington Automotive’s Hotscreen™ product incorporates fine wires that are capable of de-icing a frozen screen at -5°C inside two minutes. A recent innovation allows the full area of the screen to be de-iced within this timescale. Further customer benefits are achieved if this type of technology is employed where the wipers rest on the windscreen.

Pilkington Automotive has also developed a full area coated heated windscreen that provides both deice and anti-mist properties. As power levels increase in vehicles, this will provide an elegant way to electrically heat windscreens that have an infrared reflective coating applied directly to the glass. This heating functionality is in addition to the benefits of optimised solar control and high shape complexity that are already achieved with Pilkington Automotive coating technology.

Pilkington Automotive has also developed a patented sensor that detects moisture on the windscreen and automatically activates the windscreen wipers. This rain sensor, attached to the interior of the windscreen, detects moisture by using infrared light emitting diodes. This technology is licensed in the market place and is being increasingly adopted on new models.

Another technology that improves driver visibility is a ‘hydrophobic’ coating, which is applied to the outside glass surface and significantly improves water droplet flow from the vision area. Hydrophobic products are used extensively in Japan, with market interest in Europe and in North America.

Full Service Supply

Driven by the industry’s need for increased design efficiency and reduced time to market, Pilkington Automotive has developed a world class, full service supply capability. For the majority of its OE customers, Pilkington Automotive provides design expertise which then leads to product sequencing and JIT delivery to the VM’s assembly line.

AGR Market Offerings

Whilst all of the glazing products offered by Pilkington Automotive are initially seen in the OE market, the benefit of increasingly complex glazing installations is also felt in the aftermarket. In addition to supplying replacement glazings to the aftermarket, Pilkington Automotive also sells the tools and accessories used by windscreen fitters, thereby supplying them with all the equipment required for a reglazing job.