Carbon Fiber Knowledge
The latest from the world of advanced composites and carbon fiber technology.
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
Hydrogen fuel cell fleets in Europe are growing quickly: buses in Madrid, Cologne, and London, trucks on German autobahn corridors, and refuse collection vehicles in Dutch cities all store hydrogen onboard as compressed gas. For every one of those vehicles, a procurement team made the s
Automated fiber placement has become the backbone of large composite structure manufacturing, from business jet wings to rocket motor casings and wind turbine spar caps. A modern AFP gantry can lay carbon fiber tows at hundreds of meters per minute, placing narrow strips of prepreg with
In December 2022 the US Army selected Bell's V-280 Valor as its Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft, the program that will replace the aging UH-60 Black Hawk fleet with a tiltrotor designed to fly twice as far and twice as fast. Behind the airframe award sits a materials decision with it
The pressure cycle is the unit of truth for a hydrogen tank. A tank filled to 350 or 700 bar and emptied again experiences a fatigue load that no single burst test can represent: the liner deforms, the carbon fiber overwrap carries the alternating load, and small defects grow cycle by c
Hydrogen storage is the quiet bottleneck of the hydrogen economy. Electrolyzers, fuel cells and compressors attract attention because they are new subsystems with dramatic cost curves, but every hydrogen vehicle, refueling station and mobile power unit still needs a pressurized vessel,
Onshore blade repair is a workshop problem: the blade comes down, the damage is assessed on the bench, and the repair is made under a roof with lights, power and stable temperature. Offshore, none of that holds. The blade stays on the turbine — transport costs and crane availability mak
Every carbon fiber that flies in a commercial or military aircraft arrived there through a qualification chain that few outside the industry see. A fiber lot is not certified; a part is. The chain runs from raw fiber lot to prepreg lot, to test laminate, to subcomponent, and finally to
Adhesive bonding has been the default joining method for wind turbine blades for decades, and for good reason: it is forgiving, tolerant of manufacturing tolerances, and works across dissimilar materials. But it is also heavy. The adhesive layer in a large blade can run thick enough to