Mission Possible: Using Large Tow Carbon Fiber in Commercial Filament Winding Applications
(This article was written by Robert Murdock, President of Entec Composite Machines, for publication in the SAMPE Journal. (Co-authored by Rich Dropek, President of Composite Professionals, and Ron Roser of Entec Composite Machines.)It is a 3 MB download, which will take approximately five minutes with a 56k modem.)
It was like a scene from a television series:
The mission, if you choose to accept it; “Find a way to use large tow 50K carbon fiber in commercial filament winding applications.”
The players: Rich Dropek (President, Composite Professionals), Ron Roser (Director of R&D, Entec Composite Machines Inc.), and Zsolt Rumy (CEO,
Zoltek Companies, Inc.)
The problem: Commercial filament winders hate large tow fiber! Why?
Universally, those filament winders who have been visited by salesmen from large tow fiber suppliers have begun hiding themselves under their desks.
“Please, no more free samples, it won’t work!” is the common cry.
“But the sample is free, the fiber is inexpensive and we have an unlimited supply. This one comes with a new sizing-- please try it!”
The frustration level continues to grow on both sides. The manufacturers yearn for the day that large tow can be used to replace high-cost 12K carbon
fibers in their products, yet find themselves unable to manufacture products resembling those manufactured with the standard 12K fibers. The large tow
carbon fiber suppliers like Zoltek know that our product is so much less expensive that we should be rapidly dominating the commercial filament
winding industry.
In his zeal for some sanity and a resolution to this problem, Mr. Zsolt Rumy assigned us at Entec Composite Machines, Inc. the mission to provide a
solution to filament winders. We decided to break this mission down into the following four phases: Phase I would characterize perceived and real
customer problems and determine processing methods and techniques that will allow the user to successfully filament wind utilizing large tow, with the
success criteria being good property translation (tow-to-part) and visual aesthetics. A second objective was to characterize the 50K filament winding
process and develop a users guide. The Phase II objective was to design, test and implement material handling and equipment changes to address the
Phase I issues. The best hardware and machine characteristics identified in the Phase II trials were down-selected for Phase III & IV testing. Phase
III rebuilt the large tow structural elements used in Phase I in order to quantify the improvements to the process,while Phase IV added secondary
testing of similar products using Zoltek 50K carbon fiber exclusively.
(To read the entire article, follow the link above to dowload in .pdf format.)
