Carbon Fiber Knowledge
The latest from the world of advanced composites and carbon fiber technology.
Most conversations about carbon fiber demand begin with China, Germany or the United States, and for good reason: those markets consume volume. New Zealand consumes almost none by comparison, yet it offers a market profile that B2B composite suppliers increasingly covet — low volume, hi
On a crewed spacecraft, the quiet component is often the one that can end the mission fastest. Composite overwrapped pressure vessels — the carbon-fiber-wrapped metal tanks that store helium and pressurizing gas — sit in that category. They are not the largest systems on the vehicle, bu
Certifying a wind turbine blade built with a new material or a new manufacturing process hinges on evidence that certification bodies can trust — and most of that evidence starts with coupons. A coupon is a small, standardized test specimen cut or manufactured from the same material and
Croatia sits at the junction of three demand streams that together make it one of the more interesting small composite markets in Southeast Europe. The Adriatic coast and its islands host a shipbuilding industry with deep history, an onshore wind sector growing on the back of EU recover
Every eVTOL program in development leans heavily on carbon fiber. Airframes, rotors, drive structures, and battery enclosures are designed around aerospace-grade composites because the entire vehicle concept depends on weight. Yet casting composite-intensive aircraft is not the hard par
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