James P. Martin:
Globe Advanced Composites Equipment team members attended CompositesWorld Carbon Fiber 2016 conference in Scottsdale, AZ this month. Our friends at CW organized another great event in a beautiful location, well attended, with excellent content. Chris Red’s special session on forecasting carbon fiber industry related growth predicted a strong increase in automotive and pressure vessel applications, with existing and new carbon fiber suppliers stepping up capacity to meet demand. Long time industry colleagues Paul Oldroyd of Bell Helicopter and Arnt Offringa of Fokker (GKN) lent invaluable perspective to much of the conference content through their combined decades of experience working in military and commercial aerospace design and manufacturing. Lessons learned in economic adoption of carbon fiber composites in aerospace are just starting to trickle into automotive thinking. Applying that thinking at Globe, we focus on simplifying complex assemblies by taking advantage of the fiber direction, forming and joining attributes of advanced composites. Our workcell approach to system engineering enables cost savings through high volume production and integrated simple automation, even when premium continuous carbon fiber tape is the feedstock.
Getting out to these technical symposia and exhibitions provides regular reinforcement of Globe’s mission to offer material input-specific and part-specific process machinery and systems to enable conversion of advanced composite material formats. Contact Jim Martin, Director, Advanced Composites Equipment, to learn more about the highly flexible cure environment offered by RapidClave® and our unique approaches to volume lamination and consolidation of continuous fiber thermoplastic tape.