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