Carbon Fiber Knowledge
The latest from the world of advanced composites and carbon fiber technology.
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
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