Carbon Fiber Knowledge
The latest from the world of advanced composites and carbon fiber technology.
When a Western defense program selects a carbon fiber supplier, the decisive document is rarely a technical datasheet. It is the acquisition regulation that governs where the material can come from. The United States and its allies operate layers of domestic-preference and security rule
Composite recycling regularly fails on the spreadsheet before it fails in the plant. Pilot facilities recycle materials successfully, demonstrate clean fiber recovery, and still lose money, because the economics of a recycling business are shaped by throughput, gate fees, and output pri
The glass fiber industry has a disposal problem the size of a wind farm. A modern utility-scale blade is between 85 and 95 percent glass fiber reinforcement by weight, embedded in epoxy or polyester resin, and the installed base now reaching end of life was manufactured before recycling
When the LME nickel contract settled at USD 22,840 per tonne on 11 July 2026 and Chinese export suppliers stretched blade component delivery to around 20 weeks, the immediate reaction in the market was price risk. The structural reaction, which is the more important one, was a wave of f
Every roll of prepreg in a composites factory is a small race against chemistry. The resin that will eventually become the cured matrix is designed to stay dormant at minus 18 degrees Celsius, but the moment the roll leaves the freezer the cure reaction resumes at a slow, measurable rat
Geothermal energy has a corrosion problem that most renewable technologies never have to face. Wind turbines and solar panels sit in air; geothermal wells pump up brine at temperatures above 150 degrees Celsius, saturated with chlorides, carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulfide. Every meter
Hydrogen propulsion on the water sounds like a distant ambition until the economics of short-sea routes are laid out on paper. A ferry that crosses a fjord or runs a commuter route of 30-60 minutes needs a limited energy buffer, can refuel at a fixed terminal, and returns to the same be
Bridge inventory across North America, Europe and Asia has a common problem: a large generation of highway and pedestrian bridges built in the 1960s through the 1980s is now past or near its original design life, and the deck is failing first. The deck is the bridge element that carries
Ukraine does not appear in most classic maps of European composite demand, but it now supports one of the fastest-moving composite procurement environments on the continent. The country combines three demand streams that are normally found in separate industries: a wartime drone sector