For a variety of reasons unknown to me, I drifted away from that most permanently cutting-edge of artisanal engineering fields - carbon composites. My research project at university was all to do with aerospace carbon composites aerospace and I still have fond memories of laying up mats of prepreg, vacuuming them, cutting out the shapes and putting them in the autoclave (a fancy word for “oven”) to cure. It was all very peaceful, a far cry from my current state of frantic dashing from quality analysis to drawing release to development activities, a far cry from steel tubing and automotive PPAPs. It was actually all too dull for me at the time, to be fair…!
I still like to keep track of what’s going on in the carbon world, and harbour dreams of re-entering that realm one day (I harbour lots of dreams…) So I enjoy such series as from The Truth About Cars on the development of the carbon fibre Lexus LFA, and what’s going on with the BMW iSeries.
I recently came across what looks like a good resource for composites news, www.compositestoday.com. There really are some interesting articles in there, but the writing is frequently offputting and consists mostly, to my eyes at least, of press-releases. This article on a patent application from Apple for transparent composites is a barely legible copy-pasting from the patent text with few attempts at refinement: it’s patent churnalese. Do we really need words like “hereinafter” and “embodiment” in an online news article?
I was particularly interested to come across an article about the recycling of the hull and mast of Oracle’s 2003 America’s Cup winner. Other than chopping pieces up into 4-foot long pieces, how exactly will such structures be recycled? What methods will / can be used? Can resin and fibres be separated? Or will they end up as chunks in low-grade plastics? Alas, the article itself remains only enticing, granting us no details on how recycling will be done.
Still, with more extensive articles on the McLaren MP4/1, the car that introduced carbon fibre into Formula One, and lots of video entries aggregated from around the internet, describing Cervélo carbon fibre bikes, knitting fibres rather than weaving them and many others, Composites Today is an interesting resource - a slightly fuzzy, slick but cheap though well stocked window into my parallel history…
