K2 Snowboards manufactures thousands of quality snowboards featuring top-of-the-line technology developed at their new research facility.

Competitive snowboarders rely on a slim piece of fiberglass and some plastic strapping to ride down the sleek, often precarious slopes like the Colorado Rocky Mountains. In stiff competition, snowboarders must trust the equipment they bring to the slopes to keep from breaking in harsh conditions. Especially when the boards are tested in extreme conditions like the high intensity rides, the Superpipe, BigAir and Snowboarding X events, during the ESPN Winter X-Games. This year’s events will take place in Aspen, Colo., starting today through January 29, 2012, and new snowboard advances thanks to composites are expected to raise the level of competition.

K2 Sport based in Seattle has been engineering snow skis with composite materials since the company was founded exactly 50 years ago in November 1961. Bill Kirshner is the original founder of the company and a pioneer in the market for fiberglass manufacturing in winter sports equipment. Previous to his work in the 1960’s, most ski manufacturers were making components out of wood or metal. Kirshner, a manufacturer of fiberglass cages, knew that composites would be the future of winter sports equipment design because the use of fiberglass could prevent wood rot and other corrosion issues associated with traditional winter gear.

Today, K2 Snowboards, a branch of K2 Sport exclusively focused on manufacturing composite snowboards, still uses hand lay-up to handcraft high-performance winter sporting equipment. It stays ahead of the curve by investing in snowboard technology research and development at a state-of-the-art facility capable of building 100 percent production level snowboards in four business days. “We can concept a design on Monday, have the board ready on Thursday, test it out on Friday and potentially tweak it on Monday if we want to,” says Doug Sanders, global product director of snowboards at K2.

K2 manufactures thousands of snowboards a year and prototypes approximately 200 boards. “That mathematically works out to be about one board a day that we mold to ride, break and make it better,” says Sanders. “When it comes to manufacturing snowboards, there’s only so much engineering you can design in the board before you have to just go out and test it. Our research facility gives us that opportunity.” Some of the low end snowboards have started to implement closed molding technology like compression molding on preforms to increase the production speed, but hand lay-up is a must for the high-performance boards. “In composites, you can’t just have all hard structural layers, you need sheer layers to allow the product to flex and stay together under the enormous stresses our products go through; especially since we have to perform at cold temperatures. A lot of little components need to be put into the board and the only way to do that is with a skilled craftsman and not an assembly line. It’s the only way to get the quality we want,” says Sanders.

The snowboard team sponsored by K2 is used as a research group to develop competitive snowboards for their personal use. The athletes typically use the boards they help to develop during competitions. One composite component that has recently undergone considerable amounts of testing is the material used in snowboard cores. In high-performance snowboards, K2 uses a mixture of different woods and bamboo to strengthen the board. “We use three different trees in the core to increase strength and durability on the outsides and down the center of the board. Then we mix in some bamboo for flexibility and strength,” says Sanders. Just this year, K2 developed a board using a laminated bamboo wood core that has been termed “unbreakable.” The snowboard has gone through multiple extreme tests and riders and has never broken. Bamboo is not the lightest of woods but it is easily available for snowboard construction. “Bamboo has huge weight to strength properties. In Asia people are using it to build scaffolding!” says Sanders.

The recent downhill economy has not impacted the popular downhill sport manufacturer. “We took the opportunity to capitalize on research and development opportunities at the height of the U.S. economic depression. We saw the dip coming but we didn’t take our foot off the pedal,” says Sanders. “Our new designs started coming out around that time. The entire time I’ve been involved in the snowboard industry I’ve never seen new technology move faster than it is now. It feels like it’s the first five years that snowboarding ever existed. Honestly, if you have a board older than three years, you’re riding old technology.”

Angie Mcpherson is the communications coordinator at ACMA. Email comments to amcpherson@acmanet.org.

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Key numbers and economic indicators for 2012

This post is an addendum to Composites Manufacturing‘s January/February 2012 State of the Industry feature. For a comprehensive Industry Report, pick up a free copy of the January/February 2012 issue.

Marine: Anchored or Ready to Set Sail?

For the first time in several years, the marine segment has better news to report in terms of customer demand and improving business results among boat fabricators. Boat making was one of the early success stories for composites proving itself a better performing and more cost-effective material, and strong market demand made it one of the core segments of the composites industry for several decades. The U.S. marine market matured and leveled off in the 1980’s with 1988 being the peak year in composites usage when 538,000 powerboats and sailboats were sold. Sadly, the trend has been downward almost every year since with the exception of a few years in the mid-1990’s when personal watercraft were taking off and industry unit sales technically surpassed the 1988 record. In 2012, the industry is likely to achieve new boat retail sales of 190,000-210,000 which pales in comparison to the 1980’s and 1990’s, but is good news because it signifies the end of a downward trend of the last many years. U.S. boat sales fell 26 percent in 2009 to 207,000 units and went down another 9 percent to 188,000 units in 2010.

Over the last several years, the marine industry has been forced to consolidate and downsize and the survivors have sought ways to cut costs and raise productivity. Industry leader, Brunswick, now offers 24 separate boat brands, 17 of which it acquired since 2000. Through nine months of 2011 it reported stronger unit sales until divesting its Sealine boat brand in the third quarter. Revenues for the Boat Group were up 9 percent to $820 million and its operating losses were only $12 million compared to $77 million during the same period of 2010. Brunswick commented in its SEC filing for the third quarter that stronger unit sales were offset by the unfavorable effect of a change in sales mix towards smaller boats from larger, higher margin boats.

In May of 2010, the market research firm Freedonia Group published a five year outlook on the U.S. recreational boating industry and estimated the segment would rebound and grow at the rate of 9.3 percent annually through 2014. Not only did that forecast miss the 9 percent decline in 2010, it appears far too optimistic given the lackluster economic recovery underway in the country at large. It might be reasonable to expect the industry could generate that kind of growth for a year or two (possibly 2011 and 2012), and while composites fabricators would love to see boating maintain that pace indefinitely, there does not seem to be enough middle class enthusiasm for large discretionary purchases like a new boat so long as much of the public is still preoccupied with declining home prices and job market uncertainties.

Sports & Rec Outlook

From skis and snowboards to fishing rods, golf clubs and racing bikes, composites are being used more and more to improve performance in a number of sports. Hockey sticks, archery bows, tennis rackets and surfboards are other well-known sports applications. As such, the market is fragmented and growth comes in spurts and starts as individual products are introduced and, hopefully, accepted. While there’s no denying the success of composites in delivering light weight and strength in these products, the consumer thus far has been fickle in terms of their willingness to make the purchase decision for a discretionary item. 2011 retail sales growth in the U.S. is expected to grow about 6-8 percent and will continue in 2012, albeit at a slower pace. Even if the payroll tax is extended, customers will rein in spending early in 2012 as they pay off credit cards and return to rebuilding their savings.

Aerospace, Military and Ballistics

Today the aerospace, military and ballistics segment represents approximately 3 percent of the total volume demand for composite materials but it easily reaches 10-15 percent of the sales value, largely because of their expensive reinforcements and/or high performance resins and sometimes because of the more costly engineering and fabricating processes required to mold these sophisticated materials. Carbon fiber, aramid, S-2 glass and other exotic fibers are the typical reinforcing materials and some E-glass yarns and rovings are used sparingly. The segment has supplied carbon fiber-reinforced components for use in military and civilian aircraft during the last few decades and significantly advanced its penetration of the commercial aircraft market with Boeing’s mostly-composite design of the new 787 Dreamliner and the Airbus A350 XWB.

The aviation portion of this segment looks forward to a very healthy demand outlook for commercial aircraft. Boeing Corporation’s “Current Market Outlook: 2011-2030” predicts that global air travel will grow 6 percent in 2011 and should continue to growing at or above the historical trend of 5 percent through the middle of this decade. While the number of passengers is estimated to grow 4.2 percent over the long term and the number of revenue passenger miles will grow 5.1 percent, the actual increase in the size of the global commercial fleet will be only 3.6 percent. In hard numbers, the worldwide fleet will grow from 19,410 planes at the end of 2010 to 39,530 planes in 2030, a net gain of 20,120, but factoring in the number of aircraft that will be retired over the next 20 years raises the required build to 33,500 aircraft.

While that is a very respectable order backlog to address, the number of composite-intensive new airliners will be in the minority. Boeing currently has the capacity to produce only two Dreamliners per month and hopes to raise this figure to 10 by the end of 2013. Fully 70 percent of the total aircraft to be built in this forecast period will be single-aisle passenger jets with nominal amounts of composites. Another moderating factor in assessing the demand for U.S. composites fabricators and suppliers is that a growing percent of the composite components will be sourced overseas. As an example of how global the sourcing of composite aircraft parts has become, Boeing announced at the recent Dubai Airshow that it had signed an agreement establishing Mubadala Aerospace of the United Arab Emirates as a major Tier 1supplier of composite aerostructures. It also was no coincidence that Boeing announced at the same event that it would sell $26 billion in planes to Emirates Airlines.

Meanwhile, military demand for lightweight conventional defenses and weaponry has created many ingenious applications of composite materials since the original military uses of fiber glass during World War II. Blast panels for use in constructing barracks and mess halls in the theater of operations and improved armor for light weight vehicles like the Humvee are but a few common applications widely adopted by the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some of the more high-volume applications have already begun to phase down and are likely to continue shrinking. A strong signal of the trend in future purchases was President Obama’s 2011 federal budget which proposed that total Department of Defense (DOD) expenditures should rise by 3.4 percent or only 1.8 percent after adjusting for inflation. This ties nicely with other administration stated goals like “rebalancing the force” and “reforming how DOD does business” elaborated by Defense Secretary Gates in the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) the year before. Many suppliers of military-oriented products have already noticed a reduction in spending and we can expect leaner defense budgets for the foreseeable future.

Heavy Truck Sector

The heavy trucks industry segment represents less than 5percent of total new vehicle builds but accounts for a disproportionately large amount of composites consumption. Large truck composite features include exterior components, aerodynamic applications above the cab, jumbo-sized panels used in trailers and side skirts that can run most of the length of the trailer. As of the fourth quarter of 2011, we saw good strength in truck sales as replacement buying follows the absence of equipment buys from 2007-2009 (graph 6). Recovery in the medium-duty truck market (class 4-7) has been more subdued than heavy duty (class due to weakness in construction, small business and public-sector markets. On the other hand, operators of large rigs seem to be pressing ahead with long-delayed buying programs.

Trucking serves as a rough barometer of overall economic activity because it accounts for 67 percent of the tonnage carried by all modes of domestic transportation. According to the American Trucking Association, truck tonnage rose 5.7 percent in October from a year ago, the 23^rd consecutive month of year-over-year growth. On a monthly basis, October’s tonnage rose 0.5 percent from September. These modest growth rates in operating volumes will be exceeded in new truck unit sales in 2011 and 2012 because truckers have cut back on fleet size during the recession. The number of big rigs on the road is approximately 12 percent less than the 2006 peak year, yet tonnage levels are about the same as in late 2006. Class 8 sales are expected to rise 46 percent to 156,100 units in 2011 and 191,000 units in 2012. There is upside potential here, too, because replacement demand is currently driving the heavy truck recovery but fleet expansion is on the horizon for the more successful carriers. And looking further out, recovery in construction-sector activity should finally hit its stride in another year or two, which should allow the next stage of truck recovery to materialize.

Toyota FT-EV II

Vehicle Lightweighting
In 2011, the automotive industry started dropping a few thousand pounds off the weight of compact cars and trucks to increase fuel efficiency. Carbon fiber suppliers, such as the SGL Group and Quicksilver, contracted with European auto giants like BMW and Audi to get ready for a new wave of composite automotive parts.

First 787 Delivery

Terrafugia Transition

Cars with Wings
“It’s 2012, why don’t we have flying cars?” Well, soon you’ll have the opportunity to purchase one. The Terrafugia Transition is expected to hit the roads in 2012 and will cost upwards of $250,000. There are several other roadable aircraft prototypes currently being tested, which suggest that more designs may be on the way.

SpaceShipTwo by Scaled Composites

Personal Space Travel
Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic providing customers with personal space travel, aided by the development of SpaceShipTwo by Scaled Composites. But there are also companies, like XCOR, building commercial spacecraft for two people to be shot out into space from Caribbean-island Curacao in 2014. Even several Russian companies and Bigelow Aerospace in the U.S. are building space hotels for this growing industry.

Asimo by Honda

Is that a robot?
Honda recently upgraded its Asimo robot to run, pour drinks, communicate through sign language and do other cool tricks, making it the most inundated robot ever built! Even the military is supporting new robot technology. An updated AlphaDog robot – modeled to look and operate like, well, a dog – and its LittleDog brother are manufactured by Boston Dynamics and sponsored by DARPA. Alpha can walk over 20 miles of rough terrain and carry 400 pounds.

Knickerbocker Bridge

Bridging the gap
More bridges like Knickerbocker Bridge, the longest composite bridge in the world, are using composites to extend the life and reduce maintenance life of installations. This is increasing the visibility of composites in large structures and giving DOTs the opportunity to learn more about the material.

What was your favorite composite engineered product from 2011? Weigh-in now!

Last December, Segerstrom hopped on a StalkIt 58Five longboard and was pulled behind an SUV to showcase the durability and stability of his composite longboards. He set a new Guinness World Record for Speed on a Towed Skateboard at 78.1 mph that day.

When Lane Segerstrom heard that three professors at the University of Illinois had developed a corn-based structural composite technology, he was intrigued. He grew up on a farm in Iowa and has been inventing and taking products to the marketplace for 10 years. He instantly recognized the huge opportunity, called the University and secured an exclusive licensing agreement to make and commercialize products out of pressed corn board, a product he dubbed CornBoard.

“The potential is mind-boggling,” says Segerstrom, founder and CEO of CornBoard Manufacturing Inc. (CBMI), headquartered in McKinney, Texas. “The supply of corn by-products is endless and renewable every year, and we have a consumer that is ready and willing as long as the price and the quality is there.” While Segerstrom doesn’t think CornBoard is going to replace wood or pressed wood, he is positive it can help reduce additional demand and preserve the resource of wood as the world’s population increases.

CornBoard is made from corn stover, the biomass normally left in the field after the commercial harvest of corn crops. The stalks, leaves and husks are combined with a resin and bonded under heat and pressure to create CornBoard – comparable to engineered wood. “We can make a board that is stronger than a conventional oriented strand board, without getting too stiff, or too dense or heavy,” Segerstrom says, prefacing that CBMI is very much in the beginning stages and is currently working with the University of Illinois on getting the data and documentation to prove the material’s properties. Right now, they are using the leaves and the husk of the corn and pressing it into a non-formaldehyde resin.

StalkIt longboards and potential future CornBoard products

The first commercial product CornBoard Manufacturing, Inc. launched was the StalkIt longboard. Segerstrom started with this piece of sports gear to demonstrate the strength and versatility of the new biomass composite material. “We wanted people to say, ‘if you can make a skateboard than I’d probably be pretty good in a chair or a piece of furniture and ultimately in building materials,’” he explains. The high-performance skateboards have a 100-percent CornBoard core laminated between a top and bottom layer of ash and poplar vertical. An aluminum strip connecting the front and rear trucks helps reduce vibration at high speed. “The combination of these materials working together makes for a strong, rigid and lighter weight board than traditional longboards,” says Segerstrom, who himself is an avid skateboarder.

As supplier and manufacturer, he plans to specifically design and engineer CornBoard for different applications, using different combinations of parts of the corn and incorporate different ingredients for waterproofing, mold resistance, pest resistance and fire-rating based on the use of the final product. “We really want to control our brand and its integrity,” Segerstrom says. “Because green is hot and everybody wants to be involved in it. You may find somebody that cuts corners and reflects on our CornBoard brand; you can really get tarnished quickly.”

The entrepreneur’s market strategy is to start out with higher-end niche products to build consumer confidence and perfect CornBoard before progressing into larger markets like furniture or building materials. “The opportunity is incredible. Thousands and thousands of products are made from pressed wood, and the market is ripe for a more sustainable alternative. Competitive pricing will come with efficiency.” Case in point, CBMI just received the bio-preferred label for CornBoard pallets, opening the door to sell products directly into the government, which is mandating the purchase of preferred biomass products when available. Segerstrom says he has no competitors.

CornBoard as an eco-friendly composite

Perceptively aware of the contradiction between the corn industries bad rap and his brand’s green image, Segerstrom says it’s not his fight to fight. “I think we are helping. It’s about what we can do as a leader to inspire other companies to be better stewards of their resources. It’s a competitive advantage.” CBMI actually does help its farmers become more sustainable. The manufacturer bales only approximately 20 percent of the stover and leaves the remaining stalks on the field to prevent erosion and to provide fertilization. “We protect the integrity of the land and sustainability over a long time,” he adds. In removing part of the decomposing biomass, CBMI sequesters about 1.5 tons of CO₂ per acre that’s now not emitted into the atmosphere.

CornBoard production plants are designed to need about seven square miles of stover or less to supply them. Segerstrom avows his company will scale to be “one of the most efficient and positive carbon-negative footprints on the planet.” Excited and open to look at unique opportunities and promote the composite industry as a whole, CMBI wants to be a positive force in conveying the message that we have to look at different creative ways to become more sustainable as an industry and start changing practices to preserve natural resources around the world.

If you like this story, read about an Iowa professor making crops into composites.

Sandra Henderson is a freelance writer based in Denver, Colo. Email comments to sandrahenderson@mac.com.

James Colegrove, Senior Composites Engineer, Trek Bicycle

James Colegrove has been working in the composites industry for nearly 30 years, 20 of which has been with Wisconsin-based Trek Bicycle. He helped develop Trek’s OCLV molding technology and has been involved with design and process development of carbon fiber bikes like the Madone, Speed concept, “Y” bike, and the original 5500 models. Colgrove has a bachelor’s in recreational small business management from the University of Utah along with mechanical and manufacturing engineering coursework, holds several bike related patents and recently helped develop a system to recycle carbon fiber bike parts.

As a manufacturer, why focus on recycling?

As a company, we have tried to focus on doing the right thing. We have also tried to focus on promoting bicycles and bicycling as a solution to many of our national and even global problems. This recycling program is just another extension of what we’ve been doing for quite a while. It’s not just about our image as a bicycle company. It’s about finding other opportunities and other uses for a very expensive, very high-performance material. It’s about closing the loop.

What are the challenges in recycling CFRP?

The cost of the raw carbon fiber (CFRP) highly depends on the stiffness and ultimate strength of the material. To get the biggest bang for the buck, we need to separate the fiber out by these different grades as best as we can, otherwise you end up having to sell one of the most expensive high or ultra-high-grade materials for a standard modulus or strength material. If you combine all the different recycling streams with the complication of different fiber types, complications arise.

Another significant complication is purely logistical. We are up in central Wisconsin, our recycling partner is down in South Carolina. We have to get a truck full of material from here to down there so they can recycle it. And if you can imagine, we have dealers all around the country and around the world that want to start recycling their carbon bikes rather than putting them into a landfill. This starts to become a fairly large logistical nightmare.

Long term, what should the industry expect for recycled material?

We understood very clearly that if we could recycle our carbon fiber, it would open up many opportunities for us in the future. Right now we are investigating products we might be able to use recycled material in to close the loop. If we can bring a couple of these project ideas to fruition, our consumers can bring in their carbon fiber frame and it would get recycled. Then, we could take the reclaimed material and put it into yet another product. If we provide reclaimed material into the value stream, other industries like auto , airspace, defense, clean energy could use it in secondary parts. It’s a net gain for all of us, and that makes the whole program much more viable.

What are the material property differences between raw and recycled carbon fiber?

The reclamation process does not deteriorate the properties of the carbon fiber. However, raw carbon fiber is a continuous, unidirectional fiber. In the recycling process, the material is chopped up into one-inch long segments. So, the main change is that you don’t have what most people consider continuous fiber reinforced parts. Instead, you have a one-inched chopped fiber, which many in the industry consider a fairly long fiber.

How economical is recycling and repurposing carbon fiber?

Trek does not have a good feel for the true cost savings at this time. We know that the cost to reclaim carbon fiber is significantly lower than the cost to produce raw material. The difference is that the raw material is continuous and the reclaimed is chopped. So if you are making a part that uses chopped fibers, it makes more sense to get reclaimed over chopping raw material. We assert that the reclamation of carbon results in 96 percent less energy expended than the manufacture of raw carbon fiber.

What are your company’s goals for the carbon recycling program?

Carbon fiber recycling is not a net gain for us. It actually costs us a considerable amount of money. But part of Trek’s goal was to be zero landfill and address consumers’ concerns that there is great material nobody wants to do anything with it. Once a carbon frame has reached its life expectancy or has been damaged, the only course for it is to go into a landfill. We wanted to stop this chain of events and find new, unique ways to reuse, repurpose (or whatever the new buzzword is) for recycling our product.

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repreg scrap carbon fiber trimmings Trek is now recycle through the program.

Recycling carbon fiber may be complicated but Trek Bicycle decided that keeping this valuable material out of landfills was the right thing to do regardless. This past spring the company, which designs and manufactures bicycles, launched an ambitious full-scale carbon fiber recycling program at its Waterloo, Wis.-based manufacturing facility.

Trek’s proprietary OCLV (optimum compaction, low void) carbon material, revered by the cycling world for its strength and ultra light-weight properties, has long been considered nearly impossible to recycle. However, this thought only serves to make Trek’s goal to become “zero landfill” more impressive. Until recently, the only course for a carbon fiber bike frame at the end of its lifecycle was to languish in a landfill, becoming an exceedingly long-term environmental burden. Not to mention that in its manufacturing processes and returned product, Trek already sends between 3,500 and 4,500 pounds of carbon composites to the recycling facility each month. With its zero landfill goal, the company projects to divert up to 54,000 pounds of carbon from the landfill to repurpose each year.

Trek collaborates to overcome recycling challenges

After reading an article in Bicycle Retailer magazine on the unique challenges of recycling carbon fiber featuring Trek Senior Composites Manufacturing Engineer James Colegrove, Materials Innovation Technologies (MTI) President and CEO Jim Stike, called Colegrove with the proposal to help Trek become the first bicycle company to recycle carbon fiber. “They had a nearly complete solution for us,” Colegrove recalls.

The recycling partners face challenges like different material grades, recycling streams and a logistical nightmare. The cost of raw carbon fiber depends on the grade of strength and stiffness. “To get the biggest bang for the buck, we need to separate out the different moduli and strengths,” Colegrove, who has been with Trek for over 21 years, explains. That’s why the carbon fiber coming out of Trek’s manufacturing process is recycled in four streams: trimmings (or scraps) of nearly raw, pre-impregnated carbon fiber with epoxy resin left over from cutting pre-forms; noncompliant molded parts; fully assembled warranty frames returned by consumers; and the fourth and most difficult stream the company is trying to implement: end-of-life recycling.“We want consumers to be able to bring their product back to one of our stores when they are done with it to be recycled instead of deposited into a landfill,” Colegrove says.

Another challenge for the partnership is logistics. Trek is located in central Wisconsin, where a truck hauls the material down to its reclamation partner in South Carolina. “We have dealers around the country (and the world) and if everyone wants to recycle their carbon fiber bikes, it will start to become a fairly large logistical nightmare,” Colegrove says. We have to ask, if Trek’s shipping things around then is this recycling program still justified from a carbon footprint standpoint? He contemplates, “We don’t want this material to go into a landfill. We want it repurposed into secondary parts. This works well within the United States but we may need to set up similar programs around the world to minimize the logistical dilemma.”

The un-nuts and bolts of the recycling process

Trek keeps the prepreg scrap carbon fiber trimmings segregated by modulus so it can be recycled separately. That’s not always possible with molded parts, as some of those use both intermediate and standard modulus materials. In recycling noncompliant molded parts using different materials of various grades, the higher-performance material consequentially has to be downgraded. “But at least it’s not wasted and still can be reused in parts that typically use standard-grade carbon fiber,” explains Colegrove.

First, MIT chops the different material types into one-inch square pieces. In a patented oven process called pyrolysis, where the carbon fiber material is heated in a virtually oxygen free environment, the binding resin is removed from the fibers without deteriorating the fiber properties. However, while raw carbon material comes in a continuous, unidirectional fiber, the recycling process yields a chopped fiber. “Our bikes use continuous fiber in all portions, because it’s the fiber that’s the strong part, the resin is only there to hold the fiber in position.” While Trek doesn’t believe it could manufacture its high-end performance frames from reclaimed carbon fiber at this point, it is currently trying to find a good fit for reuse in other carbon fiber parts that don’t require the long continuous fiber reinforcement. However, none of the options the bicycle manufacturer is investigating has ripened enough to specifically talk about it, says Colegrove.

Manufacturing secondary parts makes recycling viable

While the quality of the carbon fiber stays intact, the chopped-up recycled material requires a different manufacturing process. “MIT has developed a unique pre-forming methodology that works very well with these shorter fibers. At that point, the pre-form can be infused with an epoxy resin or even a vinylester, polyester or thermoplastic,” Colegrove explains. For now, the recycled material will be used in reinforced thermoplastic applications while research and development is underway for use in automotive, aerospace, medical and recreational applications. For example, recycled carbon fiber could replace glass fiber in the near future to enhance strength and stiffness performance where virgin carbon fiber would be cost-prohibitive.

Colegrove envisions, “If through development and advocacy we can push the bicycle industry as well as other industries, there will come a time when the recycling of carbon fiber parts will be a very viable alternative to throwing them away.” In fact, he sees the composite manufacturing industry right on the threshold of reaching critical mass with carbon recycling. “Once other industries – and the bicycle industry as well – develop those good secondary parts made from non-continuous fibers and find other uses for this very expensive, very high-performance material, all of a sudden this whole recycling system becomes very viable.” MIT, for instance, has prototyped a Corvette wheelhouse support and noise or propeller spinners for aircraft. Furthermore, Colegrove deems the chopped fibers very suitable for use in injection molding for fiber-reinforced thermoplastic applications. For example, these could be electro magnetic interference shielding or other strengthening and stiffening needs in plastic parts.

It’s too early for Trek to have a good feel for the true cost savings potential in applications. “We know that the cost to reclaim fiber is significantly lower than the cost to produce raw material. So if you are making a part that uses chopped fibers anyway, it makes a lot more sense to use reclaimed fiber over chopping raw material.” According to Trek, its recycling partner MIT states that reclamation of carbon results in 96 percent less energy expended than the manufacture of raw fiber. Given these indications, recycled carbon used in applications that don’t require maximal strength should find a robust market. Until then, “this is actually costing us a considerable amount of money,” Colegrove admits. “But it’s the right thing to do. And if what Trek is doing sparks some creativity and some innovation, we are all in a better place.”

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Sandra Henderson is a freelance writer based in Lafayette, Colo.

In 2007, surfboard manufacturer Ryan Siegel began looking for an alternative to the polyurethane foam blanks made with toluene diisocyanates.

Perhaps because the sport involves riding a force of nature, surfers tend to be environmentally conscious. But the tool of their trade, the surfboard, has traditionally been anything but green.

That irony was not lost on Ryan Siegel, who has been shaping boards in Ocean Beach, Calif., for 13 years. By 2007 he was looking for an alternative to the polyurethane foam blanks made with toluene diisocyanates (TDI), which off-gas volatile organic compounds (VOCs). A friend introduced him to San Diego-based foam manufacturer Malama Composites, founded by Ned McMahon, a former surfboard shaper and marketing director for Hawaii-based board maker T&C Surf Designs.

Although officially incorporated in 2009, McMahon and his team had been working since early 2006 to make the process of manufacturing surfboard blanks cleaner and greener. They started out working with suppliers in the U.K. to replace TDI with less toxic methylene diphenyl diisocyanates (MDI) in their foam. Soon after, they experimented further by replacing the petroleum polyols used in the process with polyols derived from renewable plant-based oils, such as soy, castor and jatropha.

No one on the Malama team had a background in chemistry, McMahon says, so the process involved a lot of research and development. “We had basic knowledge of formulation, and of course we asked our suppliers questions all the time,” he says. “But frankly, a lot of it was our own testing—pouring a little bit, testing, playing some more. We had a process of running percentages. When things were going in a good direction, we’d go down that road.”

After about 12 months of testing, the team developed foam that doesn’t off-gas VOCs and can be reused or recycled.  The company calls its product AinaCore, after the Hawaiian word for “Earth,” and for good reason. Malama doesn’t just use renewable resources to make its foam; it also considers the lifecycle of the materials it uses.

Siegel, who shapes boards under his own name but is affiliated with the nonprofit artist collective Sezio, started using Malama’s MDI and soy foam blanks in 2007 and estimates he has used them in 150 to 200 boards. He now uses them nearly exclusively, though he does use other blanks upon request. Both types of foam, says Siegel, who now serves as Malama’s post-production manager, have the same or better characteristics as more toxic TDI versions. The soy blanks, in particular, have better memory and resist pressure dings better than standard surfboards. The MDI blanks even have the same clean white color.

“The soy blanks shape out pretty much the same way as any other surfboard blanks, but the main difference is the color of the foam,” Siegel says. “They have an off-white-yellow color, so it looks like a board that’s been sun-damaged…Other than that, the density, the weight of the foam, the feeling of it as a shaper is all really similar to a standard surfboard blank.”

Siegel shapes each of his boards by hand, though he says the Malama blanks can also be shaped by machine—a process many shapers are adopting. Once he shapes a board, he sends it to San Clemente-based Bashams to be airbrushed with a design or tinted with resin (if the customer chooses); wrapped in fiberglass cloth and coated with layers of polyurethane resin; fitted with a fin system, which can be inserted with plugs or fiberglassed on; sanded; and possibly finished with a gloss coat of resin and buffed out. The process, he says, is the same with the MDI and soy blanks as it would be with any other foam, with one exception.

“With the soy foam, the only thing you really need to take caution on is air brushing,” he says. “You can’t actually airbrush or paint the foam itself or else the paint will crystallize after glassing. You have to seal the blank before painting it by putting on a cheater coat of resin.”

Siegel says boards made with Malama’s soy blanks perform as well or better than boards made with more traditional materials and are similarly priced—or, in the case of his boards, cheaper. Yet, he often has to sell customers on the new material.

“Most of the time, I have to push it,” he says. “I have had people come to me specifically, but most of the time I have to educate them, let them know it’s just the same performance-wise as a normal surfboard. That’s what people worry about the most, is it going to perform the same as their other board.”

Still, he believes there is a market for greener surfboards.

“Surfers are pretty in-tune with nature for the most part, but a lot of shapers are stuck on the same path of using the same materials over and over, and they don’t want to change,” Siegel says. “Honestly, I think there are people out there willing to buy [greener] surfboards. They’re interested in it, but it’s just not readily available, and the reason for that is that the industry doesn’t want to change.”

Jamie Hartford is a freelance writer based in Hood River, Ore.

Pete Wagner, CEO and founder of Wagner Custom, strips a thin protective layer off a newly made ski at the Wagner Custom ski and snowboard factory near Telluride Colo.

Avid skiers love the buttery smooth ride of an aluminum or titanium ski.  Achieving a steady ride without vibrations—coined as “flutter”—at high speeds is a major challenge for any ski designer because most vibration reduction techniques are parasitic; they may reduce vibrations but with a weight penalty and without adding more value to the structure. So, when a Colorado custom ski builder with a mechanical engineering degree focused on composite materials and computer aided design partnered up with the maker of a visco-elastically dampened carbon fiber material, it was a match made in skier heaven.

Pete Wagner, CEO and founder of Wagner Custom got into building boutique ski gear out of a personal need. He had a pair of mass-produced skis he didn’t like. After working as a design engineer in the golf industry for ten years developing technology for fitting professional golfers into custom equipment, Wagner figured he could do the same with skis. He tweaked the design software he had created for the golf industry and made himself a custom-designed pair of personal skis.

In 2006, he founded Wagner Custom, an engineering and fabrication shop outside Telluride, Colo. “Big ski companies build custom skis for their top Olympic and World Cup athletes, tailor-made to ensure the athlete does their absolute best. That’s what we do for recreational skiers,” Wagner says. Each pair of Wagner skis is designed based on what he calls the “skier’s DNA” – not just height, weight, ability, style and favorite terrain, but also what a skier aspires to accomplish with a new pair of skis. Since 2006, Wagner has done extensive in-house materials testing and R&D in order to design the perfect pair of skis for his customers, including partnership with one composite company.

Pennsylvania-based Materials Sciences Corporation had already developed Countervail, a continuous fiber reinforced polymer product that provides integral vibration damping in performance-critical composite structures. “The composite product, originally developed for the aerospace industry, was designed to dampen vibrations in tubular satellite truss members, where conventional constrained layer damping techniques are ineffective because loads within the structure are in the plane of the laminate. As a result, our product forestalls flutter in the carbon-fiber surfaces of supersonic aircraft,” says Anthony Caiazzo, Materials Sciences Corporation’s chief technical officer.

“When I recently watched a World Cup ski race on television,” Caiazzo says, “and saw the ski tips ‘chatter’ and listened to the experts talk about the inability of the racers to hold an edge on icy, bumpy turns, I immediately understood the skiers’ conundrum. The idea is: Less vibration amplitude equals more time the ski edge spends on the snow, hence more control,” he says. “It is very difficult to reduce vibrations in skis, which are essentially core sandwich constructions subjected to flexural loads, without adding parasitic mass or compromising stiffness and strength.” Determined to find a solution, he began looking for a partner to make the carbon composite skis.

Friends of Caiazzo who used Wagner’s skis brought Wagner to his attention. “As soon as I called him up, I knew Pete not only understands ski design but also how advanced materials technologies could improve ski performance,” says Caiazzo. The Materials Sciences Corporation had been collaborating with large ski factories, but Wagner was the one able to figure out how to make the structural fiber work on skis. Wagner ran a series of tests to determine the mechanical properties of the Countervail material then plugged it into his design algorithms. According to his blog, Wagner reports that Countervail consists of a thin viscoelastic polymer cloth with fine strands of carbon fiber woven along its length in a sinusoidal or serpentine pattern. Because the stiff carbon creates a two-dimensional pattern, it provides strength in both flex and torsional axes. The harsh reactive stiffness of the carbon is moderated by the viscoelastic fibers. “As a result, you get a ‘light, strong, whippy but self-damping structural layer without the fatigue, bending or delamination problems common with metal skis,” he says. “We built the skis using a sandwich construction in a wet lay-up process, the Countervail of course being the structural layer.”

Over a period of two years, Wagner’s crew built, took to the slopes and altered several prototypes. Finally the team had a sleek carbon-composite ski, effectively giving his ultra-high performing lightweight skis the desirable smooth feel and stability with substantially reduced chatter.

“The Countervail kits in Wagner skis are a carbon fiber, so there are cost implications,” says Caiazzo. Wagner skis start at around $1,800 whereas others range from between $300 to $600. However, Wagner says they still have an upper hand. “We are a small but really nimble high-end manufacturer. We’re not discouraged by more expensive, more exotic materials and are willing to spend more time on product development.” he says.

“While most of their skis are made with FRP or aluminum alloy, these products create a ski with a damper feel than standard carbon fiber. Thus, we began offering an upgrade to the Countervail carbon composite on all his designs for almost a year.”

Sandra Henderson is a freelance writer based in Denver, Colo.

Pete Wagner, CEO of Wagner Custom Skis

Pete Wagner is the CEO and founder of Wagner Custom Skis. Pete received a BS in mechanical engineering, focusing on composite materials and computer-aided design at UC San Diego before entering the golf industry as a product designer. For close to 10 years, Pete created software tools for the design, analysis and manufacturing of composite material golf equipment. After receiving an MBA in entrepreneurship at the Leeds School of Business, University of Colorado at Boulder, Pete opened Wagner Custom’s solar and wind-powered ski factory just outside of Telluride, Colorado.

How did you get into designing and building custom skis?

I identified a need for myself from my own experience after buying a pair of skis that I didn’t like. At that point I had spent almost ten years as a design engineer in the golf industry designing composite material golf equipment. I had developed a technology for fitting people in their perfect equipment and I basically applied that same technology to help skiers. I saw a need that I could fill and it has worked out great.

What qualities are customers looking for in a custom-made ski?

Performance. The biggest difference between custom skis and mass-produced skis isn’t so much in the material, it’s the fact that you are buying something that’s fit for you. People invest in custom skis so they can ski at their absolute highest potential. Our typical customer is someone who lives in a ski town and is skiing most days. We also get “city people” who want to spend their short vacation having fun skiing and not trying to figure out what equipment they should be on.

What sets you apart from your competition?

I find that most custom ski makers aren’t even engineers, they’re more garage tinkerers. I think we have an edge due to the fact that we—as engineers—do a lot of in-house materials testing and R&D.

How did you get from manufacturing your own pair of skis to building an entire company?

Fairly soon after I’d started my business, a company called Materials Sciences Corporation approached me and said, “We developed this visco-elastically dampened carbon fiber material that evolved out of a U.S. Defense Department application. It’s lightweight and is used for aircraft wings. Can you figure out how to make this work on skis?”

We did a series of tests to determine the mechanical properties of that material, plugged it into our design algorithms and were able to figure out how we can best use it. We then built several prototypes, put them out on snow and got a lot of people to test it. With their feedback we went through several alterations and come up with the best method for using their product on skis. In total it was about 18 months before we started selling it.

Why do you think the Materials Sciences Corporation chose you, a small ski maker, as a partner?

We are a small but really nimble high-end manufacturer. They’d been working with some large companies, but nothing came out of them. The big ski companies are about producing a ski as inexpensively as possible, whereas we are willing to use major quality materials and spend more time on product development. Because of that, we were actually able to bring aerospace-grade skis to market.

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Brown did just that — albeit with a slightly less-than-Olympian crowd — Friday morning on the main stage at COMPOSITES 2011 with the Body Bar Flex, which he has developed over the course of the last five years.

“I’ve done most of my work with flexible PVC (polyvinyl chloride) and rigid PVC, but even rigid PVC is flexible, said Brown, the president of Flexi-StiX, LLC, and an industry veteran with decades of experience. “Inside, I put a rectangular pultruded composite because in high-flex applications, you want it to be rectangular. Bow handles, for example, are rectangular.”

Composites are more and more prevalent each year in athletics. With the recent popularity of other products that work muscle groups in novel ways, Brown might just achieve his goal of reaching a wider Body Bar Flex audience. Of course, he might also find more uses for that rectangular pultruded composite inside that extruded thermoplastic tube. This piece of equipment might be just the start.

To read more on the Flexi-Stix, click here. An interview with Gordon Brown is also available here.