The automotive and aerospace industries are ready ramp up their production of composite parts, and
The Group's Composite Materials team in the
Composite materials are set to represent an increasingly important proportion of what vehicles of all sorts are made of, as the trend towards emissions reduction through lightweighting is only going to accelerate. Certain niche markets like high-end automobiles and an increasing number of aircraft parts have already started paving the way towards replacing metal with composites for specific applications, but there are two major roadblocks keeping composites from moving into mass production: cost and complexity.
The fact is, making a part from composite materials is currently 'an essentially manual process, which is fine for low volumes,' explains
A unique solution to automate composite manufacturing
The answer of course is the automation of production lines. But that's easier said than done. Because of their tack (stickiness), composites are tricky to manipulate for assembly robots. Moreover, a series of other issues such as debris on the parts and the pre-treating and cleaning of tools mean the process remains a slow and expensive one, with many crucial steps necessarily carried out by hand, as Rich mentions.
But over the past few years,
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In fact, with DDF, the production time for a single piece, from raw material to finished and ready-to-use part, is brought down to three minutes, which amounts to over 100,000 parts per year, thanks to continuous production as the robots can work simultaneously.
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