The funding has been allocated to the Advanced Fibre Cluster Geelong and will support joint projects by businesses and researchers on carbon fibre, advanced fibre and composite manufacturing.

It’s hoped the new funding will raise the region’s technology leadership resulting in new products and processes making the region more globally competitive. Examples of project outcomes will include: reduction in energy consumption; new products for automotive and defence industries; other new industrial applications for carbon fibre; and improved carbon fibre recycling.

Federal Member for Corangamite, Sarah Henderson MP, said the $14 million Advanced Manufacturing Growth Centre is an incredibly important initiative for our region.

The Advanced Manufacturing Growth Centre sends a very strong signal to our nation that Geelong and Corangamite are at the forefront of advanced manufacturing.

Members of the Advanced Fibre Cluster include carbon fibre wheel manufacturer Carbon Revolution, CSIRO, Austeng and Quickstep. The cluster is supported by the Geelong Manufacturing Council. Geelong is also the location of the Advanced Manufacturing Growth Centre’s National Carbon Fibre Manufacturing Collaboration Hub, created with Deakin University and CSIRO Fibres of the Future Laboratory.

The Advanced Manufacturing Growth Centre is part of the Government’s $250 million Industry Growth Centres Initiative, an industry-led approach to driving innovation, productivity and competitiveness through investing in key industry sectors.

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The additional production supports the recent decision by Ford Performance to race Ford GT in both IMSA and World Endurance Championship (WEC) series events for four years.

Dave Pericak, global director, Ford Performance said;

While we can’t build enough Ford GTs for everyone who has applied, we are going to produce additional vehicles in an effort to satisfy more of our most loyal Ford ambassadors. We want to keep Ford GT exclusive, but at the same time we know how vital this customer is to our brand.

Year three of production will support applicants who were placed on the wait list; previously deferred applicants and those who missed the initial application window will be served by production year four. The application process for fourth-year production will reopen in early 2018. Those who already applied to own the car will only need to update their request.

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The investment will support the growing India glass fibre market through the installation of a state-of-the-art 80,000-ton glass melter at the Company’s existing facility in Taloja, India. The new melter is expected to begin start-up operations in early 2018.

Owens Corning is one of the industry leader in the Indian glass fibre market and the substation investment shows a continued commitment to growing their business in the area to meet globally increasing demand for composite materials.

The glass fibre market in India has grown at double-digit rates over the past decade and has operated at high levels of capacity utilisation for the past three years.

Expanding their existing operations in India allows the company to benefit from a low-delivered cost platform while supporting growth in this region and worldwide. Additionally, this facility will leverage the newest technologies Owens Corning has developed to enable greater competitiveness in the market.

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The new production line is set to double the production capacity of key raw materials that are used to make carbon fibre reinforced composite products. The new line has won qualification by Boeing to manufacture secondary structures such as wing movable flaps and engine nacelles, as well as interior applications.

The expansion covers the facilities and equipment to convert acrylonitrile monomers into standard modulus carbon fibres. This type of fibre is used to manufacture composite materials which have been pre-impregnated for use in applications on commercial and military planes.

Solvay’s CEO Jean-Pierre Clamadieu said;

Through this strategic capacity expansion we offer our customers greater supply capabilities and contribute to their increased needs for reinforced composite materials to reduce weight and fuel consumption and to reduce assembly costs by integrated part design. For Solvay this production expansion results in greater flexibility to strengthen our growth innovative composite materials and our leading position in the industry.

Carbon fibre composite materials’ durability, strength and fatigue life allow them to increasingly and securely replace metals on aircraft, reducing their weight, noise and CO2 emissions. In addition, composites enable the moulding of multiple sub-components into one assembly part, lowering the number of parts required as well as the assembly costs.

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The tower which has been installed in Taman Tasik Prima, Puchong is 70% lighter than a conventional steel tower whilst being 10 times stronger. In addition the company also said it was up to 50% faster to install and the anti-corrosive will contribute towards lower maintenance costs over the lifespan of the structure.

These features result in lower total cost of ownership of 20%. As the company gains more experience in the deployment of carbon fibre towers, customisation requirements will lessen, bringing the company closer to its target of 40% in TCO reduction.

The company’s next carbon fibre installation will be a rooftop structure in Bangladesh where it will provide a solution to building constraints. edotco is investing into high quality infrastructure and encouraging tower sharing where tenancy ratio has improved to 1.3 now.

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The car which was showcased at the Science in the City festival in Manchester is made by the Briggs Automotive Company in Liverpool who are trialling the new lightweight material for use in its single-seater Mono sports car.

The graphene-enhanced resin used on this project is stronger than traditional materials, which has enabled the reduction in the amount of fibres in the composite material, resulting in a significant weight and cost reduction.

James Baker, graphene business director at The University of Manchester, said:

The graphene car is an excellent example of how graphene can be incorporated into existing products to improve performance. It shows that graphene is having a real world impact just 12 years after it was isolated.

BAC worked with Carmarthenshire based Haydale Composite Solutions on the trial, which used graphene-enhanced carbon fibre, and focused on the rear arches because of their size and complexity, which allowed the material and manufacturing process to be thoroughly tested.

The company’s proprietary process disperses graphene within the resin matrix, exceeding the performance specifications of the part, while making significant savings in mass with reductions of approximately 20%. This has clear implications for cost, performance and fuel economy in vehicles if applied widely in the manufacturing process.

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The agreement sets out to advance the innovation capability and capacity across the two organisations. Luxembourg’s aspirations to strengthen its (already strong) innovation capacity are supported by €1 billion for programmes and infrastructure, including the opening later this year of a €60m composites centre. The new centre will complement LIST’s capabilities, which include bio-based materials, nano additives and life cycle analysis, all of which are of interest to the NCC.

The National Composites Centre opened in 2011 and now employs over 200 staff. The NCC has the means to research, design, develop, prototype and test across a full range of relevant sectors. It has partnerships with Research and Technology Organisation’s and Universities in the UK and globally, to ensure delivery of the optimum solutions for industry.

The Memorandum of Understanding between the NCC and LIST offers an important opportunity to grow knowledge through partnership. This is a model that the NCC has utilised already with other leading intuitions such as the Japanese National Composites Centre and the Stichting Thermoplastic Composites Centre in the Netherlands, alongside University research groups across the world including the University of Bristol. The link between LIST and NCC will further advance exploitation of the opportunities of composites for the UK.

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The institute will house the Centre for Composites Manufacturing and Simulation where Purdue researchers and graduate students from the local College of Engineering and Polytechnic Institute will conduct research and development on composite materials to increase energy efficiency for the vehicle production, wind, aerospace and other industries.

Purdue’s Product life-cycle Management Centre and the Indiana Next Generation Manufacturing Competitiveness Centre, or IN-MaC, also will be located in the institute. The three centres will occupy 30,000 square feet of the 62,000-square-foot institute. The institute’s remaining 32,000 square feet will be used for public or private enterprises interested in collaborating on composite materials research with Purdue University.

The Centre is part of a $250 million U.S. Department of Energy initiative to support President Barack Obama’s National Network for Manufacturing Innovation. The DOE project, called the Institute for Advanced Composites Manufacturing Innovation a five-year public-private collaboration that includes a federal commitment of $70 million and over $180 million pledged by industry, state economic development agencies and universities. The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, is the lead institution in the collaboration that includes public and private agencies in Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, Tennessee and Colorado.

In partnership with the Indiana Economic Development Corporation, an expenditure of almost $35 million in research equipment and materials in the institute is expected over the next five years, funded through a cooperative agreement with the DOE.

Purdue Research Foundation invested $11 million in the construction of the building on property that was, in part, donated by the City of West Lafayette Redevelopment Commission. The foundation already owns the remainder of the land for the development.

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Today, lasers are in consumer electronics devices, medicine, metallurgy, metrology, meteorology, and many other areas. Lasers are created by stimulated emission in an active medium, which could be a gas, liquid, crystal, or glass. The wavelength of a laser and the efficiency of converting energy into radiation are both dependent upon the parameters of the active medium.

Ivan Obronov, a researcher at MIPT, and his colleagues used a ceramic obtained from compounds of rare-earth elements – lutetium oxide with added thulium ions (Tm3+:Lu2O3). It was the thulium ions that enabled the ceramic to generate laser radiation.

Ceramics are a promising type of medium for lasers because they are produced by sintering powders into a polycrystalline mass. They are cheaper and easier to manufacture than single crystals, which is extremely important for mass adoption. In addition, it is easy to alter the chemical composition of ceramics, which in turn alters the laser properties.

The laser they developed converts energy into radiation with an efficiency of more than 50%, while other types of solid state lasers have an average efficiency of approximately 20%; it generates infrared radiation with a wavelength of about two microns (1966 and 2064 nanometres). The wavelength is what makes this laser so useful for medical purposes.

Ceramic lasers have a significant competitive advantage—they are cheaper to manufacture, simpler and more reliable, and approximately four times more compact than holmium lasers making them ideal for surgical use.

Another potential application of ceramic lasers is the composite industry. Widely used one-micron lasers are good at cutting metal, but polymers are practically transparent to them. A two-micron ceramic laser, on the other hand, can effectively cut and engrave plastics, such as composite materials.

Composites are increasingly being used to produce technological equipment such as aircraft components. The wing of the new Russian MS–21 airplane is almost entirely made of composites.

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Chopped bamboo fibres were added to a bio-polymer resin to create bamboo-based pellets, resulting in a more sustainable material that can be used for manufacturing moulds, prototypes, appliances and furniture. The research team 3-D printed a table that contains 10 percent bamboo fibre composite.

Researchers behind the experiments developed 10% and 20% bamboo PLA composites which are 100% bio-based and fully sustainable. Structural and environmental benefits behind bamboo make it and interesting option for additive manufacturers, who could use the newly developed pellets as a substitute for more traditional printing materials.

Researchers are investigating the use of different types of cellulose fibres to develop feedstock materials with better mechanical performance that can increase the number of available composites and opportunities for sustainable practices.

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