Carbon Fiber Knowledge
The latest from the world of advanced composites and carbon fiber technology.
For two decades the benchmark question about carbon fiber supply was a question of price: when would Chinese capacity push industrial-grade tow down to commodity levels? That question has been answered. The new question is a question of structure: what happens when the same production b
For most of the past decade, European buyers of aerospace-grade carbon fiber treated the material almost like a commodity. Orders were placed against published price lists, lead times were measured in weeks, and multiple suppliers were kept in competition precisely so that no single mil
Mechanical recycling is the workhorse of composite recycling: scrap parts are shredded, granulated and re-compounded into new materials. The process has a fundamental side effect — every pass shortens the reinforcing fibers. A fiber that is too short cannot transfer load effectively, so
Every wind turbine blade eventually becomes a disposal problem, and the first industrial step of that problem is dismantling and pre-processing. A modern blade is 60-115 meters long, weighs 20-40 tonnes and is built from a mix of glass fiber, carbon fiber, epoxy, balsa and adhesives. It
Wind energy is now the largest single demand sector in the global carbon fiber market. Industry estimates put wind-sector consumption at roughly 100,000 tonnes in 2025, ahead of aerospace, pressure vessels and automotive. The driver is simple: blades keep getting longer. When a blade pa
Kenya has become the composite materials market to watch in East Africa. Three demand engines are converging at once: the expansion of the Olkaria geothermal field, already Africa's largest and now targeting significant new capacity; the steady growth of Nairobi's Jomo Kenyatta Internat
Natural gas vehicles have never captured the headlines earned by battery-electric trucks, yet they quietly carry a large share of long-haul and regional freight across Asia, the CIS, and Latin America. Compressed natural gas is cheap, abundant, and burnable in proven engines, and the in
Thermoplastic composites are usually discussed through two extremes. At one end sits automated fiber placement with in-situ consolidation, which can build large, complex geometries but deposits material slowly and costs millions in equipment. At the other end sits stamping with glass-ma
Ireland sits between two of Europe's densest composite clusters — the United Kingdom's aerospace industry and the offshore wind supply chain of the North Sea — yet it is usually treated as a footnote in market studies. That position is misleading. The country operates the world's larges