Composite Products Worth Seeing

This week marks the beginning of the new baseball season, and these companies hope to hit a home run with their new products:

ITW Plexus is all about bonding; specifically, with three new structural adhesives.

ITW Plexus is all about bonding; specifically, with three new structural adhesives designed to produce strong yet flexible bonds on composites and offer medium to long working times for large assemblies. Two-part structural methacrylates dispensed manually or with standard meter-mix equipment, MA530, MA560-1, and MA590 are 100 percent reactive, non-sagging gels recommended for joining composite assemblies, ABS, acrylics, FRP, gel coats, polyesters, PVC, styrenics, and vinyl esters.  The company says the adhesives require little or no surface preparation and cure at room temperature to tough, durable bonds that withstand service temperatures of – 40° to 180° F. They are targeted for such applications as boats, trucks, buses, architectural ornamentation, wind turbine blades, and composite bridges and decks.

RocTool is turning up the heat with its new 3iTech technology, a process of heating a carbon fiber mold by electromagnetic induction. The process involves super heating cartridges, which are placed differently depending on the process required (RTM, thermo compression, plastic injection, vacuum formed and hollow part production). RocTool says the process can heat a mold up to 400°C in several minutes or to 120°C in several seconds, which they say is a cycle time for the mass production of carbon composite parts which has never previously been reached. Also, by removing the constraints of inertia state, RocTool says the system can separate the heating of a fixed part to a moving one, or locally heat a tool to a chosen temperature level. The company says the material could find good usage in aerospace, automotive, and recreation applications.

Beta Prepreg is Airtech Advanced Materials Group’s new room temperature storage tooling prepreg.

Beta Prepreg is Airtech Advanced Materials Group’s new room temperature storage tooling prepreg, which delivers laminate properties to conventional epoxy systems and is based on Benzoxazine resin chemistry. Beta Prepreg systems take advantage of the latest resin and latest toughening technology to provide outstanding ease of use and performance. Beta tooling is stable for a minimum of six months at room temperature. The prepreg is meant to have low resin shrinkage during cure and develop a very high glass transition temperature, intended to result in reduced logistical costs, more flexible workshop scheduling and extended tool life. The company also says post machining quality of Beta laminates allows machining of complex geometry details and maintenance of very tight dimensional tolerances.

Not enough prepreg action for you? Then check out Lewcott Corporation’s FM5LF polyester resin system for tubular radome applications. The FM5LF is presently being used in high performance antennae radomes for a number of vehicles for military vehicles such as the Humvee, MATV and MRAP. The FM5LF is designed to offer the user a combination of toughness and handling that facilitates high volume production of components. These new and improved prepregs extend the Lewcott family of both epoxy and polyester prepregs, targeting specific manufacturing and dielectric performance to benefit laminators, molders, and end users in a variety of radome and antenna applications.