Q&A: Using the Same Process to Enter New Markets

Jon Fox-Rubin, President/CEO of Fiberforge on composites in leading industries.

Fiberforge began 12 years ago and commercializes a manufacturing process that turns thermoplastic prepreg tape into finished parts. It relies heavily on automation and thermoforming, and has found success in the high performance market, even though its original focus was in automotive.

What is your relationship to the composites industry?

We sell design and engineering services to prototype applications, and also produce parts as part of that. We also sell turnkey manufacturing systems based on this technology. Some customers want to bring their technology in house and we work with them to develop the system. It doesn’t necessarily need to be a dedicated system for each part. Some customers might have six different end applications they make on one system.

How does your technology work?

It is very much a platform technology. Our station automates the lay-up of tape into a flat preform that is spot-welded together (called a “tailored blank”). The station can run nearly any thermoplastic prepreg tape, such as tape made from glass fiber and polyethylene terephthalate (PET). Following lay-up, the tailored blank is removed from the station and heated and cooled under pressure to fully consolidate the flat blank. This step removes the voids between the plies and results in a custom tailored reinforced thermoplastic structural laminate. Next, the blank is heated in an infrared oven and once the resin reaches a molten state, the blank is shuttled into a thermoforming press where matched metal forming tooling (that’s designed for the final part shape) rapidly forms the part while the resin around fibers freezes/crystallizes. The result is a fully engineered structural composite.

How does your process differ from competing technologies?

Other competitive approaches use hand lay-up to lay up their materials. So our process competes with that as well as other ways used to make a flat pre-form. Some companies’ laminates are made on double belt presses using a textile approach, where you take woven fiber and impregnate it with the same thermoplastic resin in the laminating process or double belted press and stamp large thickness panels with standard fiber orientations. What’s missing is the ability to have fiber orientations and lay-ups; furthermore, the scrap waste is much higher with that process.

Where did you initially target this technology?

The company was initially started to attack the lightweighting opportunity in automotive because we saw the need for advanced composites in this market. The first five years were focused on coming up with this patented process and commercializing it in automotive. However, about four years ago we decided to focus on other markets it was mature enough to go into.

What markets were these?

We found the technology worked well within high performance markets such as aerospace and defense. Early on, we were focused on very affordable conversion of prepreg tape into finished parts. But it turns out the process has very high structural performance because we fully consolidate the flat panel before we form it. So it’s made a lot of sense for high performance aerospace markets.

How is this used in aerospace?

To give you an example, we make a load floor for Sikorsky’s new heavy-lift helicopter, the CH-53K. That part is made of carbon fiber and polyether ether ketone (PEEK), which is on the opposite end of the materials cost and performance scale from glass fiber. That one has high structural/quality requirements, but it’s made on the same relay station and thermoforming system.

What factors caused you to focus less on automotive?

We thought we could convince the auto industry to enter into a long-term relationship with us and license the basic intellectual property (IP) and work with us as commercialization partners. But we failed at that early on because we faced cost-performance challenges and the applications couldn’t be produced at a high volume. We worked with a number of automakers and they were interested in our technology, but ultimately it wasn’t a strong-enough value proposition for them to invest tremendous dollars. We realized that there wasn’t a willingness to pay for carbon fiber.

How did you discover opportunities in newer markets?

We were being courted by customers with problems in the aerospace and defense sector. It was more of an entrepreneurial shift than a strict market analysis. We did a consulting group market analysis to see where the technology would fit and ironically, the report said aerospace would be slower for us than automotive because of the huge qualification hurdles we would have to overcome. But we found that the technology solved some critical aerospace problems related to low void content and damage tolerance. We have a window frame flying on a Bombardier challenger jet. It’s an S-glass PPS part, so it has incredible strength and stiffness.

Why did the market analysis say aerospace would be slower?

It’s really because we’re introducing a brand-new material in many cases. For each aircraft platform, there’s a qualification process, both by airlines and the FAA. The perception was it would be a time-consuming and expensive process. In our helicopter load floor, we partnered with a material supplier and that’s going through a rigorous military adoption qualification process. The other reason it sent caution was there were very big entrenched players in these existing markets and they are competitive. For example, the Hexcels and Zyteks of the world that provide materials and in some cases produce parts themselves. So on the materials side, they’re already in those markets. There are also manufacturer tiered networks to the aerospace industry that don’t want to give up their applications. Our business model actually helps tiered suppliers because we can sell systems to them.

Where do you think the auto industry is going?

They are still relatively slow to fully go after primary structure with composites. They have been trapped in a risk-averse world. They’ve tried to scale up thermoset manufacturing processes and make them faster, which is cost-prohibitive. They are doing a great job on integrating chopped glass and fiber into existing thermoplastic and thermoset technologies, which gives them functional integration. So you’re starting to see door panels that are injection molded, but there’s glass fiber in the resin that gives them a good bang for their buck. In some cases, they’re able to reduce complexity and weight of these parts at comparable costs. But they’re not yet putting in good long continuous primary structural applications.

Do you think composites will grow in automotive applications?

I think that will happen, but the DOE hasn’t funded enough programs. We’re seeing a recent emphasis on funding battery capacity, but if there was that much capital going into scaling up manufacturing for lightweighting, it would be more synergistic. If you throw these battery technologies into existing automotive platforms, you’re spending more than you need to for business. It’s not being optimized as a system like it should be. The process will start by having success building smaller parts, and then taking more risk with bigger parts until ultimately you could make the whole structure out of thermoplastics.

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