Updated Pretreatment Technologies for Automotive in Japan

Recently, to avoid global warming, reduction of $CO_2$ generation has been demanded. Each car manufacture takes positive actions for improvement in fuel consumption by various kinds of countermeasures, e.g. improving engine efficiency, using alternative fuels, lightening the car body. Regarding lightening of the car body, aluminum alloys and high tensile strength steels has been gradually adopted as lightweight materials. However, such materials are normally not easy to be treated with zinc phosphate system. Focusing the pre-treatment processes, low temperature phosphate system could be demanded for energy saving. This time, new surface conditioning process for lightweight materials and low temperature phosphate system shall be discussed.