Carbon Fiber Knowledge
The latest from the world of advanced composites and carbon fiber technology.
Europe's defense budgets have been rising for two consecutive years, and the composite industry is now seeing the consequences in its order books. Airlift and fighter sustainment programs need structural carbon fiber, drone programs need lightweight airframes at volume, and missile prod
Blade architecture has been remarkably stable for two decades. A blade is a laminated shell, a spar cap that carries the bending load, and a web or shear web system that keeps the cap in position; the spar cap is almost always built at the blade factory, either by stacking pultruded pla
Blade manufacturing is one of the last largely manual steps in wind turbine production. A thermoset blade of 100 meters needs hundreds of hours of hand layup, a multi-hour curing cycle in an oversized mold, and a workforce that scales with global blade demand. For factories in high-wage
Nickel is not the first input that comes to mind when a wind turbine blade is being planned. The blade itself is mostly carbon fiber, glass fiber and resin; the raw material conversation usually revolves around fiber supply, epoxy prices and pultruded plate capacity. Yet the sharpest co
The economics of thermoplastic composite spars for wind turbine blades turns on a deceptively simple variable: the width of the unidirectional (UD) tape semi-finished product. Wider tape means fewer tape passes to build a spar cap, shorter layup cycles and lower handling cost, but it al
Deepwater oil and gas production pushes every riser system to the limit of what steel can deliver. In water depths beyond 1,500 meters, the weight of steel risers drives up floater payload, requires larger buoyancy modules, and imposes fatigue demands that accelerate with every meter of
European hydrogen truck and bus fleets are entering their scale-up phase. Industry analysts tracking heavy-duty hydrogen programs across the European Union expect more than 50,000 fuel-cell trucks and hydrogen buses to be in operation by 2027, up from a few thousand in 2025. The growth
Electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft carry an unusually high share of carbon fiber in their airframes. Analysts estimate that composite materials account for 60-70 percent of the structural mass of typical four-to-seven-passenger designs, a density of carbon fiber usag
Canada has long played a supporting role in the North American carbon fiber story — the second-largest aerospace composites base on the continent, but always in the shadow of the United States. That positioning is changing. Three demand streams are converging to make Canada a market wor