With Corning’s ColdForm™ Technology, bending glass for dashboards and consoles is more affordable for automakers and is a revolutionary way of bending glass that uses less energy.
Can you imagine shaping and flexing glass without heat? Corning is making the impossible possible as the company works to achieve its new sustainability goals. In early 2020, Corning Automotive Glass Solutions announced the industrialization and commercialization of Corning® ColdForm™ Technology for curved automotive interior display systems. With this technology, Corning can help enable large, curved, and integrated display designs with cover glass that is made in a more cost- and energy-efficient manner, all because of an unexpected manufacturing twist.
There’s no way around it: making glass requires heat. And to date, the heat doesn’t always stop after material creation. Most commercial products and applications use traditional hot-molding process to mold glass, which can add up in cost and energy usage. After shaping using heat, salt baths for chemical strengthening need to accommodate shaped parts and, further down the line, surface treatment applications must be carefully calculated to uniformly coat the curves. Corning is changing this.
Shaped glass will serve as a design differentiator as automakers follow consumer trends toward more display interactivity and smartphone sophistication extends into vehicle manufacturing. Shaping glass without the heat has the capability to redefine auto interior design possibilities, making innovative curved designs more affordable and widely available.
By using AutoGrade™ Corning Gorilla Glass with Corning’s patented ColdForm Technology, advanced and shaped dashboards and consoles can be covered by a piece of glass that bends at room temperature. This means each part of the manufacturing process step – from fusion forming to chemical strengthening, from decoration to shipping – is all done with flat pieces of glass, effectively reducing cost and energy spend.
“To move into everyday vehicles, curved display designs have to be affordable,” said Michael Kunigonis, vice president and general manager of Corning Automotive Glass Solutions. “Our ColdForm™ Technology helps make that possible and represents a real advancement in efficiency for auto interior designs.”
By removing heat from the process, Corning’s ColdForm™ technology reduces shaped cover-glass part costs by up to 40% versus comparable hot-formed parts while delivering exceptional performance. ColdForm™ Technology can bring delicate curves to formerly flat infotainment systems in an economical way — making the digital revolution that much more affordable.
“Corning has been revolutionizing the glass industry for nearly 170 years,” said Fabio Salgado, commercial director, Auto Interiors. “By inventing a bending technology for automotive applications that uses less energy and costs less, we’ve created a win-win for Corning, our customers, and the environment.”
