If the battery housing gasket is already pre-assembled by the supplier of the battery housing cover, Dana equips the gasket with additional insertion studs for the cover, as desired by the customer. If repairs are needed, the folding gasket can be removed and replaced without damaging the battery housing. The gasket’s continuous sealing contour, without any cut, protects against potential leaking points due to bulging and elongation. The flexible elastomer folding elements are much more stable, withstand tensile, bending, and shearing forces, compensating for tolerances in the millimeter range and ensuring they remain securely in position. The gasket is supplied as a single piece, eliminating the time-consuming and fault-prone piecing together of the individual gasket parts.
When compared to other technical solutions such as pieced together and fluid seals, the folding gasket from Dana has a clear advantage. To further improve corrosion protection, each bolting location is also able to be sealed. The folding gasket complies with the important regulation, UL94, where the polymer must self-extinguish within seconds. The polymer is extruded with the edge molding process and features self-extinguishing properties. The seal and the folding elements form a circumferential and uninterruptible gasket profile around the entire rim of the battery housing. The battery-housing gasket is a flat gasket made from a supporting sheet with a dual-sided elastomer seal. The Victor Reinz® folding gasket from Dana is already being used to seal the battery housings of vehicles in Europe and North America that are at the verge of introduction to the market. There is no risk of assembling the gasket incorrectly. The gasket simply needs to be placed on the battery housing – and is unfolded using a installation fixture. We have also introduced the concept 'Reman Challenge', which is an academic competition, where engineering students across Europe gets to research in the upcoming challenges for the automotive remanufacturing industry.Folding, transporting, placing, unfoldingĭana’s innovative battery-housing gasket is folded for transport to match the size of European pallets to a maximum size of 1,100 mm x 700 mm, making it especially useful for logistics and assembly. In 2018, we also launched our Mechatronics Forum, which is a web platform with the purpose of creating a network for entities interested in Mechatronics. Therefore, we opened our own Academy in 2018, where our employees are educated in the latest trends and technologies, such as Mechatronics. We always strive for more knowledge and a better expertise. This will ensure that we continue to lead the way in the future, by keeping up with industry developments. Furthermore, we research in future tendencies in the automotive industry, so that we can optimise our workflow and add new, attractive product groups to our portfolio.
Afterwards, we research in how to remanufacture these parts. We explore new car models in the market to find automotive parts within our eight product groups, which are not part of our product portfolio yet.
That is also why, our competent R&D team is developing our reman processes and adding product numbers to our existing ranges.
In an industry that is constantly evolving, and where engineering, electronics and software are moving to a whole new level in the field of mechatronics, we need to be prepared for new technologies to expand our product portfolio.