MAHLE receives Automotive News PACE award for its EVOTEC 2 Lightweight Piston technology

The award was presented at the 21(st) annual Automotive News PACE award ceremonies held recently at the Max M. Fisher Music Center in Detroit. MAHLE was one of 14 winners among 36 finalists.

MAHLE’s EVOTEC® 2 is a lightweight aluminum piston with a very high structural strength especially designed for modern gasoline engines.

“EVOTEC® 2 technology helps our customers further advance the development of lightweight, CO2-efficient engines,” said Jochen Adelmann, head of PCU Technology for Light Vehicles at MAHLE GmbH. “With this new technology we’ve achieved significant reductions in weight and increased structural strength as well.”

The new MAHLE piston also enables the development of modular systems that can include ring carriers (RC) and salt-core cooling channels (SC) based on specific customer requirements.

MAHLE’s basic EVOTEC® design features a narrow skirt on the thrust side of the piston and an elastic broad skirt on the anti-thrust side. MAHLE engineers further optimized the design to increase structural strength and reduce weight by approximately five percent.

An EVOTEC® RC piston with a ring carrier and an EVOTEC® SC with a cooling gallery significantly expand the ability of the EVOTEC® 2 for raising power densities and increasing robustness, as well as providing further reductions in CO2 emissions.

A piston combining RC and SC technology currently is under development.   

The engineering team for product and process development of MAHLE Engine Systems and Components GmbH, headquartered in Stuttgart, Germany, was responsible for the development of the innovative new piston EVOTEC® 2.

“We are honored and proud to win this award,” explained Dr. Joachim Wagenblast, head of Product Development Engine Systems and Components North America. “Our teams worked very hard to achieve the development targets of reducing the weight by 5% at high mechanical strength and managing to establish a robust production process.”

PACE judges visited MAHLE’s headquarters in Stuttgart as part of the award-selection process.

The EVOTEC® 2 piston went into production in February 2012 and AUDI was the product’s first customer.

MAHLE has a local presence in all major world markets. In 2014, some 64,000 employees at more than 140 production locations are expected to generate sales of around EUR 10 billion (USD 13.8 billion). At 10 major research and development centers in Germany, Great Britain, the USA, Brazil, Japan, China, and India, more than 4,500 development engineers and technicians are working on forward-looking concepts, products and systems.