Morphing Surfaces
Morphing Surfaces technology is a paradigm shift beyond today’s active shutters, flaps and grilles. It employs actively bending surfaces that can be designed to visually blend into a vehicle’s bodywork while opening or closing to optimize cooling, venting or aerodynamic functionality when required. This provides a “no-compromises” solution for vehicle designers to balance aesthetic and performance needs for future vehicles
Morphing one surface at a time.
Morphing Surfaces is an enabling technology that allows the surface of the vehicle to change and adapt to improve its efficiency and features.
Now the A-surface can be manipulated to optimize vehicle performance and convenience. For example, morphing surfaces can optimize thermal performance for battery systems, aerodynamics and improve packaging flexibility. Combining our advancements in materials, architecture, and actuation we can literally offer a flexible, seamless, exterior surface.
Design is now morphable
Vehicle designs are moving towards sleek, clean, smooth surfaces. Morphing allows for appearance goals to be achieved without compromise. For example, if the vehicle needs access for thermal venting the space can now morph as needed.
Are We There Yet?
How we get to morphing takes a lot of research, trials, and testing that leads to a multitude of possibilities on where we can go. To take a step back we decided to break this technology down into levels, starting with our aerodynamic products we make today:
- Level one consists of actuated surfaces. This is what you see on the road today like our aerodynamics product suite. The surface moves from open to close using a mechanical actuated motor.
- Level two is what we call morphable surfaces and is where we are spending our time actively developing and shaping what it could be. Think about surfaces that change in topology and imitate organic elements.
