General Steven Whiting, commander of U.S. Space Command, discusses strategic objects for defense in space. Source (All Images) | CW

The last time I walked the halls of the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs was in 2019, during what now feels like the early days of a new space era. Space Force had just been established under the first Trump administration. NASA’s Artemis Program was still in its early stages. And the U.S. had only recently regained its ability to send astronauts to space thanks to SpaceX’s Crew Dragon — the first time since the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster. The optimism back then was palpable, with growing collaboration between commercial companies and agencies like NASA and ESA setting the stage for a renaissance in spaceflight.

Fast forward 5 years, and the industry has indeed boomed. From the rise of carbon fiber rocket platforms by Rocket Lab and Firefly Aerospace, to the proliferation of constellation satellites like Starlink and OneWeb, the growth has been explosive. According to The Space Report presented by the Space Foundation, space workforce employment grew by 18% between 2019 and 2024. Leslie Conn, director of research and digital programming at the Foundation, highlighted that much of the growth on the manufacturing side — propulsion units, space vehicle parts and systems — was driven largely by private sector innovation.

Firefly Aerospace, enjoying the success of its recent Blue Ghost lunar lander, has its sites set on upcoming Alpha rocket launches for the Department of Defense (DOD) as well as another lunar lander mission to the dark side of the Moon. 

The dominant player in commercial space remains SpaceX, but others are carving out their niches. Firefly and Rocket Lab, once scrappy newcomers, now provide reliable launch alternatives. All of this progress set the backdrop for this year’s 40^th Space Symposium — one that felt markedly different.

Politically, we’ve come full circle. With the return of the Trump administration and Elon Musk assuming a major advisory role, there’s a new urgency in space policy, matched by an equally intense wave of geopolitical maneuvering. Tariffs on foreign goods have rattled international partners. DOGE-led funding cuts across government agencies have many wondering how space programs — particularly NASA’s — will be affected. With NASA’s Washington D.C. lease expiring, and talk of a possible move for the agency’s headquarters, the future feels uncertain.

That uncertainty was echoed during the recent Senate confirmation hearing of Jared Isaacman, Trump’s nominee for NASA administrator. A civilian astronaut and entrepreneur, Isaacman was grilled on his priorities: Moon first, or Mars? While he reiterated the importance of lunar missions as part of Artemis, he hinted at potential changes in scope — particularly regarding funding for the Gateway orbiter and permanent lunar infrastructure.

Meanwhile, acting NASA administrator Janet Petro discussed current plans at Space Symposium. In a fireside chat, she stated that Artemis II (a crewed lunar flyby) would target July 2026, with Artemis III — the long-awaited crewed lunar landing — scheduled for mid-2027. Still, doubts linger about the potential shifts in the program, especially amid funding constraints.

But the overarching theme of this year’s Symposium was clear: defense.

In a commanding keynote, General Steven Whiting, head of U.S. Space Command, unveiled his “Five Elements of Victory,” outlining strategic objectives for maintaining U.S. space superiority — with a strong emphasis on deterring adversaries like China. Whiting stressed that space dominance would rely heavily on foreign collaboration, particularly through NATO and allied space agencies.

Panels throughout the Symposium underscored this. A panel discussion featuring the Council on Foreign Relations cautioned that uncertainty — especially with tariffs and shifting alliances — and lack of funding could undermine collaborative progress.

For now, the space community seems to be in a holding pattern, waiting to see where policy, funding and strategy land. Defense is the clear focal point. Exploration? Still in the cards, but dependent on how priorities shake out between Mars and the Moon.

What does this mean for composites manufacturers? Jim Harris, managing director of Hexagon Purus, noted continued growth in demand for hydrogen storage systems, with aerospace and space comprising a healthy chunk of its business. Jeremy Senne, director space structures at Rock West Composites echoed that sentiment, noting exponential growth in space-related work over the last 5 years. When commercial aerospace dipped during the pandemic, many composites manufacturers leaned into defense and new space — a trend that seems poised to continue.

Figure 1. Crashworthiness building block for composite transport aircraft. Sources | CHM-17

In my two previous columns, I discussed the lower and intermediate levels of the building block approach for crashworthiness testing and analysis of composite structures. I focused on the commercial aviation industry, for which a building block exercise has being performed and documented by the Composite Materials Handbook-17 (CMH-17) Crashworthiness Working Group¹.

This building block approach features a multilevel process for designing composite structures with crashworthiness requirements. The overall goal is to validate the analysis methods through testing and then certify the structure by analysis. Therefore, the analysis methods selected for use must produce realistic simulations of test articles. A “building block” approach of progressively larger test articles is followed, in which the complexity of testing and analysis increases and the number of tests decreases. Although not the primary focus of this column, the use of numerical analysis methods for predicting the crashworthiness of composite structures is a key element in the building block approach.

The building block pyramid, shown in Fig. 1, illustrates the levels of crashworthiness testing and analysis associated with a composite transport aircraft. Each level of the pyramid addresses varying aspects of structural response, progressing from simple material coupons to increasingly complex subcomponent, component and full-scale test articles.

My initial November 2024 column focused on the coupon-level crush testing used in the recent CMH-17 building block exercise. Flat-coupon crush testing was used to identify carbon fiber/epoxy laminates that produce high crush stress and energy absorption values. An initial assessment of numerical analysis methods was also possible through the prediction of the flat-coupon crush behavior and resulting energy absorption. These activities lead to further testing and analysis at the element level, focusing on composite C-channel stanchions used to support the lower cargo floor in a transport aircraft fuselage. In addi­tion to serving as structural members during normal aircraft operations, these stanchions also serve as primary energy-absorbing structural elements in an emergency landing event.

As discussed in my subsequent February 2025 column, a total of 11 different finite element-based progressive damage and failure analysis (PDFA) methods were assessed. The analysis teams were provided with flat-coupon crush test results as well as the C-channel test specimen geometry and drop-weight crush test conditions. Each team predicted the crush behavior using their unique numerical analysis approach and submitted their predicted crush behavior and resulting energy absorption for each of the C-channel laminates. After predictions were received from all analysis teams, the experimental crush test results were distributed to all participants².

In this third and final column of the series, my co-author Dr. Mostafa Rassaian and I will discuss the upper levels of the crashworthiness building block. We will continue to focus on transport aircraft using the building block approach documented in detail in the Composite Materials Handbook-17. Additionally, we’ll focus on the important roles of numerical analyses at the upper levels of the building block.

In general, the higher building block levels focus on test articles and loadings that produce multiple failure modes.

Although the crush testing at the lower levels of the building block pyramid typically produce a single, dominant failure mode, the complex assemblies at the higher building block levels tend to produce multiple failure modes that occur simultaneously or in separate stages within the composite test article. At the subcomponent building block level, testing and numerical analyses focus on an assembly of element-level structures that includes the primary energy-absorbing C-channel stanchions from the previous building block level as shown in the “element/subcomponent” level of Fig. 1.

An additional focus of subcomponent-level testing and analysis is the mechanical connections and the resulting interaction during crushing of structural elements that form the subcomponent. Results from subcomponent-level crush testing are used to ensure that the numerical analyses are properly predicting the sequence modes of failure, load redistribution and resulting structural element crush behavior observed during crush testing. As a result, crush testing is typically performed using multiple candidate subcomponent designs when developing subcomponent-level structures for crashworthiness. The overall energy-absorbing capability of these subcomponents is directly related to the materials used in the elements as well as their positioning within the subcomponent. As a result, extensive subcomponent-level crush testing and analysis typically is required within a building block approach to design crashworthy structures that will perform as intended.

At the component level, a larger assembly of elements and subcomponents that represents a significant portion of the primary crush structure are tested and analyzed. In the CMH-17 building block approach, a candidate component-level test article would include a portion of the aircraft fuselage barrel as shown in the “component” level of Fig. 1. In addition to further assessing the effectiveness of element- and subcomponent-level energy-absorbing features, component-level crush testing is used to assess the connections between adjacent elements and subcomponents. In general, component-level crush testing produces multiple failure modes due to multi-structural interactions under variable loading conditions and impact velocities during the crash event, as well as the complexity of the possible failure mechanisms within the assembled component.

As is the case for other levels of the building block, component-level testing is also used to validate the numerical modeling approach. This includes the material modeling parameters and crush-related properties for predicting energy absorption. In general, the higher building block levels focus on test articles and loadings that produce multiple failure modes due to interacting failure mechanisms. This can occur simultaneously or in separate stages within complex components, as well as variability in impact loading during the crash event.

Full-scale crashworthiness testing is often performed as a final validation test. For transport aircraft, full-scale crush testing is typically performed using a full-barrel section of the complete aircraft fuselage. Depending on the crashworthiness test program, however, a subassembly such as the half-barrel section shown in Fig. 1 may be used in place of the full test article for validation of all modeling parameters.

For more information regarding the building block approach for composites crashworthiness, an extensive write-up is available in Revision H of CMH–17¹. Details of the recent crashworthiness building block exercise are also available in a soon-to-be-published NASA report².

References

¹Composite Materials Handbook - 17 (CMH-17), Volume 3, Chapter 16: “Crashworthiness and Energy Management,” SAE International, Rev. H, 2025. Materials Usage, Design and Analysis.

²Rassaian, M., Pereira, J. M., et al., “Progressive Damage and Failure Analysis Methods Applications for Aircraft Crashworthiness and Impact Energy Management,” NASA/TM-20250002545, Spring 2025.

About the Author

 

Mostafa Rassaian

Dr. Mostafa Rassaian is a leading expert in computational structural mechanics, impact dynamics. An AIAA Fellow, he pioneered model-based structural mechanics to advance lightweight, damage-tolerant aerospace designs. A former Boeing Technical Fellow, he spent over 30 years at Boeing. There, he led certification by analysis supported by smart testing for the B787-8, using the building block approach to predict damage initiation and propagation across various loading conditions and crash scenarios, ultimately leading to FAA type certification. He holds 31 U.S. patents in computational structural mechanics and has published over 100 technical papers. As chair of the Crashworthiness Working Group for FAA-sponsored CMH-17, he leads PDFA predictive capability modeling best practices for composite structures. He is the lead author in the development and establishment of the PDFA evaluation framework, to be published in a NASA TM assessing computational methods for aircraft crashworthiness in spring 2025. He consults on material modeling for dynamic event-based simulation. mostafa@rassaianllc.com

About the Author

 

Dan Adams

Dr. Daniel O. Adams is president of Wyoming Test Fixtures Inc. (Salt Lake City, Utah, U.S.) and an emeritus professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Utah, where for 23 years he directed the Composite Mechanics Laboratory. He holds a B.S. in mechanical engineering and an M.S. and Ph.D. in engineering mechanics. Adams has a combined 45 years of academic/industry experience in the composite materials field. He has published more than 120 technical papers, is chair of ASTM Committee D30 on Composite Materials and co-chair of the Testing Working Group for the Composite Materials Handbook (CMH-17). He regularly provides testing seminars and consulting services to the composites industry. Dan@WyomingTestFixtures.com

Continuous thermoplastic composite pipe (TCP) manufactured in lengths up to 1.2 kilometers is wound onto 3-meter-diameter transportation spools, significantly reducing field joint requirements and enhancing installation efficiency compared to conventional steel solutions. Source (All Images) | Hive Composites

As the global shift toward cleaner energy sources intensifies, hydrogen has emerged as a crucial element in decarbonization strategies. Its versatility as a low-emission fuel at the point of use makes it applicable across various sectors. However, the effective use of hydrogen hinges on its safe and efficient transportation, a challenge that traditional steel pipeline infrastructure has struggled with due to issues like hydrogen embrittlement and high installation costs.

Thermoplastic composite pipe (TCP) technology offers a promising alternative, delivering significant performance and environmental advantages over conventional metallic systems. However, adapting TCP for hydrogen transport involves certain complexities due to the gas’s distinctive chemical and physical properties, requiring careful material selection and design optimization to ensure pipeline integrity and operational efficiency.

(Loughborough, U.K.) is one industry player that has developed an innovative TCP system — leveraging advanced composite materials and specialized manufacturing techniques — designed specifically for hydrogen applications. Peter Hansen, director at Hive Composites, emphasizes the significant impact of TCP on hydrogen infrastructure: “A carbon footprint analysis has shown that the global warming potential [GWP] of TCP is more than four times lower than that of equivalent steel pipes in the materials, manufacturing and transport phases. This represents a substantial reduction. Additionally, the operational and decommissioning emissions for TCP are approximately 60-70% lower than those for steel pipes of equivalent size.”

Hive Composites’ TCP system can be manufactured in continuous lengths of up to 1.2 kilometers (depending on the diameter), enabling efficient spooling and rapid installation while maintaining the structural integrity and gas permeability essential for safe hydrogen transport. This ability to produce long and continuous pipe not only reduces transportation and installation requirements but also enhances the overall sustainability of the technology. Designed to operate at pressures up to 100 bar and with diameters ranging from 2-6 inches, the TCP system is well-positioned to support hydrogen as a fuel and maximize its potential impact in the energy landscape.

Multilayer configuration, design strategy

The development of TCP for hydrogen applications required a careful approach to material selection, leading to a multilayer design focused on meeting performance metrics while ensuring compatibility at the system level. The final configuration features high-density polyethylene (HDPE) for both the inner and outer layers, augmented with glass fiber-reinforced polymer (GFRP) and other specialized barrier materials. These reinforcing layers are thermally fused together, resulting in a “fully bonded” composite structure that is designed to safely contain hydrogen over extended periods while maintaining full spoolability (more on this below).

The choice of HDPE was based on an in-depth analysis of the polymer’s qualities relevant to hydrogen services. “The tight molecular structure of HDPE provides inherent resistance to hydrogen permeation,” states Dr. Mat Turner, technical director at Hive Composites. “However, the criteria for selecting HDPE extended beyond its barrier properties to encompass a comprehensive range of operational demands.

“HDPE exhibits remarkable chemical resistance and the ability to resist stress cracking, which are critical for ensuring long-term durability under varying pressure and temperature regimes,” he elaborates. “Moreover, the polymer’s natural resistance to moisture absorption and its wide thermal stability range — from -40°C to 60°C — enhance consistent performance in diverse global service conditions. Additionally, its impact resistance exceeds that of some alternative thermoplastics, which is vital for installation and resilience against external damage.”

Glass fiber reinforcement approach

Various fiber-reinforced polymers were assessed for reinforcement; however, glass fiber was ultimately identified as the final choice for several reasons. Glass fiber not only provides optimal chemical resistance to hydrogen but also offers enhanced impact resistance compared to carbon fiber, which is crucial for handling during installation and ensuring long-term durability. A custom glass fiber/polyethylene (PE) tape formulation, incorporating fiber, sizing and a PE composition, was developed for these pipes to balance high performance with cost efficiency.

“The lower modulus and higher strain capacity of glass fiber are particularly beneficial for our TCP application,” Turner explains. “These traits allow for tighter spooling radii, increasing the amount of pipe transportable on each reel and enhancing installation efficiency, while also providing a cost-effective solution.”

The application of GFRP layers employs a tape construction that optimizes fiber alignment to ensure production consistency. This method builds upon established glass fiber/PE composite technologies, Hive Composites says, leveraging decades of material compatibility knowledge within the composites industry. The resulting composite structure achieves fiber volume fractions exceeding 60%, yielding mechanical properties that are said to rival traditional prepreg systems while maintaining ease of processing.

Barrier layer design

A specialized non-permeable barrier layer is strategically placed between the HDPE liner and the structural fiber reinforcement, crucial for effective hydrogen containment. While specific material details remain proprietary, Hansen notes that, “the barrier system uses thermoplastic polymers engineered for compatibility with the other layers, designed with precise processing techniques to ensure long-term structural integrity between layers. The multilayer design required careful consideration of thermal expansion coefficients and interfacial chemistry to maintain structural integrity throughout the operational temperature range. This was particularly important in developing joining methodologies, which ensure the continuity of the barrier layer at pipe junctions — essential for overall system performance.”

Thermal management, quality control integration

Hive Composites collaborated with Fibron Pipe (St. Valentin, Austria) to develop the advanced manufacturing system used to achieve hydrogen-capable TCP. This technique employs a thermal fusion methodology that features highly precise temperature management across multiple heating zones, along with customized cooling profiles designed to minimize residual stress.

The thermal management system accurately regulates energy input during both the preheating and consolidation stages. It incorporates hardware controlled by programmable logic controllers to ensure uniform energy distribution around the composite pipe’s circumference. Thermal imaging analysis confirms that temperature consistency is maintained within ±2°C across the entire pipe diameter during processing. This precision is crucial for ensuring uniform characteristics of the barrier layer and its structural integrity.

To enhance quality assurance beyond traditional visual inspections or periodic testing, the Fibron Pipe system also incorporates AI-driven technology, which enables it to perform thousands of real-time checks per minute throughout the manufacturing process. Key parameters monitored include the precision of tape placement, the gap width between adjacent tapes, the distribution of consolidation pressure and temperature uniformity.

These innovations lead to a TPC manufacturing process that not only maximizes production efficiency and quality control but also minimizes environmental impact. Energy consumption during production has been reduced compared to traditional TCP processes, and production rates have seen substantial improvements. Additionally, the long pipe lengths can be transported on 3-meter-diameter spools, which reduces transportation and installation requirements and costs, providing further sustainability benefits over steel.

Testing and validation framework

Hive Composites has established a comprehensive multi-tier testing pyramid that spans from thorough material characterization to complete system validation, aiming to qualify its TCP for hydrogen service.

The preliminary phase focused on characterizing individual material components to establish baseline properties and assess the technology’s environmental responses. The testing program evaluated the properties of the HDPE liner in various environments while concurrently assessing the durability of the glass fiber reinforcement under different exposure conditions. Key metrics analyzed included the permeation resistance of the barrier layer and the stability of interfacial bonds between composite layers. Regression testing of tapes and liners through accelerated aging programs lasting up to 10,000 hours allows projections of data applicable to 20 or 30 years of service with a greater degree of certainty.

A pivotal innovation in this phase was the development of a specialized testing apparatus for high-strength unidirectional (UD) tapes. Traditional testing methods often resulted in premature edge failures due to stress concentrations at the specimen gripping mechanism interface, which obscured the true capabilities of the material. “Our gripping system alleviates stress concentrations, ensuring that failures occur within the gage length, leading to more representative results,” Hansen explains. “This advancement was instrumental in accurately characterizing material performance under operational conditions.”

To investigate long-term material behavior, Hive Composites devised specialized accelerated aging protocols. Specimens were subjected to hydrogen, air and water at 60°C for up to 10,000 hours, with systematic evaluations of mechanical properties conducted after periodic exposure. A distinctive feature of this program was the maintenance of constant strain on the reinforcement tapes during environmental exposure, which simulated service conditions with sustained pressure more accurately.

“Our permeation testing methodology, refined from the ISO 15105-1 pressure sensor method and performed in-house, accommodated both flat specimens and full pipe sections,” says Hansen. “Our tests evaluated pressures up to 100 bar and temperatures ranging from ambient to 80°C, while continuously monitoring the permeated gas pressure and analyzing both steady-state and transient permeation behavior.”

The full-scale pipe testing program, which led to demonstrations at two sites, was developed in close collaboration with Det Norske Veritas (DNV, Høvik, Norway) and conducted in-house at Hive Composites. The finalized test framework validates the effectiveness of Hive Composites’ current design and manufacturing methodologies for safe, hydrogen-capable TCP.

“Our testing adhered to protocols adapted from DNV-ST-F119 and API 15S standards specifically tailored for nonmetallic composite pipes used in gas transport, with modifications to ensure compliance with hydrogen service requirements,” Hansen notes. “This comprised assessments of short-term burst pressure, long-term regression, cyclic pressure loading, rapid gas decompression resistance, spoolability verification and joint integrity evaluations.”

To help develop standards for hydrogen TCP, Hive is also a partner in a joint industry project run by DNV aimed at identifying and addressing existing gaps in traditional TCP standards that overlook practical considerations associated with hydrogen service, which can lead to significant oversights. This initiative revealed critical areas requiring enhanced validation procedures, including the standardization of hydrogen permeation measurement methods.

Performance data, test results validate system robustness

Permeation testing conducted over an extended period at a pressure of 70 bar highlighted the benefits of the multilayer design. “The analysis of the HDPE liner alone indicated a temperature-dependent variation in hydrogen permeation rates at 60°C,” Hansen observed. “The addition of a specialized barrier layer reduced these coefficients by three orders of magnitude. Furthermore, when we included thermally fused layers, we detected no permeation during the 4-month test. This result aligned very well with the full pipe tests.”

Accelerated aging studies revealed that the HDPE liner material showed no signs of chemical degradation after being exposed to hydrogen for up to 10,000 hours at 60°C. Mechanical property evaluations of hydrogen-saturated specimens indicated that any changes were reversible, with complete recovery occurring once hydrogen was removed. In contrast, exposure to water had a more significant impact on the degradation of glass fibers compared to hydrogen, as anticipated. Testing the tapes in water, while an extreme scenario, has proven to be an effective method for evaluating and screening different tape formulations, helping to select materials for the final product.

Structural performance evaluations, conducted through regression testing of the full pipe system (including both pipe and fittings), have established the long-term pressure rating of the system. Hansen elaborates, “Analysis of time-to-failure data across various pressure levels produced a regression curve that indicates consistent performance significantly exceeding the design requirements for hydrogen service, showcasing a predicted service life of more than 30 years under normal operating conditions. The design approach adopted also allows for accommodating a longer service life.

“The structural performance during rapid decompression events has been particularly impressive,” Hansen adds. “Recent tests conducted at demonstration sites in Holland and the U.K. — specifically at the DNV Spadeadam site — subjected the pipe to pressurized hydrogen service for 2 months before performing rapid decompression tests. Post-test inspections revealed no permeation through the pipe wall or commercial fittings during this trial, and there was no degradation in interface properties or structural integrity, even under conditions designed to stress interface boundaries. These findings validate the system’s robustness and the effectiveness of the manufacturing process in maintaining structural cohesion under extreme conditions.”

Environmental impact assessment

Data from Hive Composites and Fibron Pipe indicate that average installation speeds for TCP are around one kilometer per day, which is approximately 40 times faster than traditional steel pipeline installations. While the material costs for TCP are comparable to those of steel alternatives, the installation expenses are significantly lower. A total cost analysis evaluated over a 20-year service life has shown that adopting hydrogen-capable TCP is at least four times more economical than using traditional steel solutions

A carbon footprint analysis was conducted using the “cradle-to-gate” approach, which covers all significant energy and material consumption during the manufacturing process of TCP. This includes upstream greenhouse gas emissions related to materials, transportation and waste. The Product Carbon Footprint of Hive’s TCP system shows a GWP of 11 kg CO₂-equivalent compared to 40-50 kg CO₂-equivalent for steel pipes, indicating a significant reduction in emissions. Moreover, the operational and decommissioning emissions for TCP are approximately 60-70% lower than those for steel pipes. The capability to produce continuous pipe lengths of 1-2 kilometers significantly reduces the number of required field joints, thereby enhancing both installation efficiency and long-term reliability.

Further analysis indicates that Hive Composites’ multilayer TCP system demonstrates significant potential for carbon capture and storage applications, as the composite structure’s inherent corrosion resistance addresses the challenges posed by carbonic acid formation in CO_â‚‚ transport pipelines, while the adaptable barrier technology can be optimized for CO_â‚‚ permeation resistance, providing a versatile alternative pathway for decarbonization infrastructure should hydrogen distribution networks face implementation delays. 

Joby Aviation, in cooperation with A&P Technology, Toray Advanced Composites and NIAR, recently conducted a time study comparing layup of a partial wing spar using traditional woven prepreg and braided material. Source (All images) | A&P Technology

From its inception, (Santa Cruz, Calif., U.S.) has established itself as one of the front-runners in the advanced air mobility (AAM) market and shows no signs of slowing down. In January 2025, Joby announced it had successfully completed static load testing of the tail structure for its electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft and had conducted its first Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) testing under Type Inspection Authorization (TIA), a certification process for an aircraft to begin commercial passenger operations. Joby claims that it is the first eVTOL manufacturer to complete three of five stages of TIA. In March 2025, Joby also announced a partnership with U.K. airline Virgin Atlantic to launch its air taxi service in the U.K.

Joby makes extensive use of composites for its eVTOL aicraft. As it prepares for commercial operations, Joby has explored how to scale its manufacturing. In collaboration with materials supplier Toray Advanced Composites (Morgan Hill, Calif., U.S.), A&P Technology (Cincinnati, Ohio, U.S.) and the (NIAR, Wichita, Kan., U.S.), Joby recently conducted a time study seeking to optimize aircraft part design for high production rates, while meeting cost and sustainability targets. The project involved production of a partial wing spar and studying the manufacturing time and cost differences between two material solutions: A&P’s TX-45 continuous +/-45° braided reinforcement and Toray’s TC380/T800HB 6K traditional 0°/90° woven fabric prepreg.

Initial material iterations and testing

Joby’s current layup method involves cutting Toray TC380 0°/90° 2×2 twill woven prepreg on the bias to achieve plies with 45° orientation. Joby and Toray are working to qualify this material (NCAMP Material Specification NMS 380). In the meantime, Joby saw an opportunity for potential material savings by replacing the woven reinforcement with a braided reinforcement from A&P Technology. According to Chantel Camardese, product manager, thermosets for Toray, the alternate approach uses the same fiber and weave pattern, but is produced on a 45° bias, which aids in drapability and minimizes the need for splicing.

A&P Technology’s TX-45 braided material.

Joby had an interest in A&P Technology’s braided material from early on. According to Joby’s composites rapid development lead Rory Giffen, his team first began working with +/- 45° braided 2×2 twill on the company’s prototype aircraft. The team was looking for continuous +/-45° plies that would simplify ply cutting as well as reduce the overall ply count. They initially experimented with A&P’s Bimax material — which included stabilizing yarns called axials. However, the axials restricted the material’s drapability and ultimately caused Joby to rule Bimax out due to the complex shape of its aircraft.

A&P Technology took this feedback and, after continued iteration, developed TX-45, a pure 45° fabric without axials and in 2023 approached Giffen’s team to run initial trials. While both Bimax and TX-45 enable more efficient processing, TX-45 is more drapable over long, high aspect ratio parts. The TX-45 material was tested using the fuselage skin lamination mold from Joby’s prototype aircraft — the same conditions that raised Giffen’s initial concerns over drapability. After a successful trial, subsequent meetings were scheduled to evaluate TX-45 for adoption in Joby’s production aircraft.

“Right away we were really interested in the TX-45,” says Aurelien Stamper, composites and airframe manufacturing engineering lead, Joby Aviation. “Unfortunately, at the time, we didn’t have the bandwidth to do the trial in-house.” This led Joby and A&P to approach NIAR about performing trials at its facilities in Wichita, Kansas. From there, the layup study was developed.

The scope of the project was to compare prepreg reinforced with traditional woven 0°/90° 2×2 twill to prepreg reinforced with A&P Technology’s TX-45 braided +/-45° 2×2 twill. The study could prove a single batch equivalency between the two approaches and enable Joby to include TC380/T800HB 6K 2×2 twill TX-45 into its qualified products list (QPL), a list of products that have been tested and proven to meet specific quality and performance standards.

Why braid?

Braided reinforcements offer an advantage over a traditional woven prepreg layup by offering long, continuous lengths of off-axis orientation. A bias +/-45° architecture is optimal for various torsion dominated parts, particularly those with high aspect ratios including aerospace parts such as wings, spars and stringers. Additionally, +/-45° plies comprise 50% of a quasi-isotropic layup of woven material (0°, +45°, -45°, 90°). Based on this, A&P Technology set out to prove that TX-45 can provide a more efficient and higher performing material for the +/-45° plies because there would be no splices or waste associated with ply rotation and kitting multiple short pieces.

“There is a lot of waste material when you’re trying to make 0°/90°s and 45°s in the same nested cutting operation,” says Stamper. “To reduce this, we were looking at nesting the 0°/90° and 45° plies separately, even though it would be less efficient. But with the TX-45 material, we saw a huge potential for scrap savings while still being able to nest the plies together.”

Stamper says that Joby wanted to select a part that promised the most benefit during both ply cutting and layup. It also needed a part that was large and and complex enough to provide an accurate representation of the time savings and material savings possible.

“We wanted to make sure we picked a part that was long enough to see the benefit from going beyond the current control width and be able to cut it lengthwise on the table,” says Stamper.

Joby decided on a 40-foot-long section wing spar — roughly a third of the full-size spar. Joby also designed and fabricated the tooling, which it shipped to NIAR along with the TX-45 material provided by A&P. “We looked at many different parts,” says Stamper. “The spar section has a tapered U-channel, which is a bit complex.”

Hand layup comparison

One of the goals of the TX-45 time study was to compare the efficiency of ply cutting and kitting, as well as the waste material generated. Engineers were provided with 2D cut files of Joby’s wing section and asked to extract prepreg plies from the TX-45 braided material and Toray TC380 2×2 twill woven 0°/90° prepreg for the layup exercise.

Joby’s AFP senior manufacturing engineer Robin Johnston, the engineer responsible for developing the required cut files and instructions that were used for this trial, supported the trial in person at NIAR. Eight plies, each 12 feet in length, were extracted from the TX-45 material. The TC380 woven material stack of the same sequence of eight plies was made, with each layer consisting of four to five splices in each ply. Material cutting, kitting and hand layup times were recorded to compare efficiency between the two material types during fabrication of the demonstration part.

Raku Tool SB-0451, a brand of machinable boards by Ramf-Group, was used as a low-cost tooling material option.

For consistency purposes, four trained staff personnel were involved in both approaches and the process was monitored to capture the layup time of each ply, robustness of the process and final part quality. The contoured geometry of the part dictated that each ply had to begin from the center of the tool and drape down to the inner and outer radii.

The technicians reported that the initial ply that directly contacts the mold was challenging to lay down on both trials, due to the low tackiness of the mold surface. Application of heat was helpful in securing this first ply.

During the study, braided material showed more flexibility (drapability and conformability) when stretching, compared to the woven material, and generated significantly fewer wrinkles which can contribute to part defects. In addition, the study revealed that it was more challenging to even out wrinkles with the woven twill material and required extra time spent on carefully laying up each section to ensure an effective overlap. The quality and evenness of the final part was much higher on the TX-45 braided wing section.

NIAR technicians splice a section of the wing spar layup.

Splicing requirements for the woven material also presented a challenge. When laying up the 12-foot section with traditional prepreg, each spliced piece had to be carefully guided to match the splice requirements and maintain centerline to even drape lengths on either side.

With the TX-45 material, the splicing requirement was eliminated. Because of this, the ply cutting task was simpler and the expertise required to operate the Gerber (Tolland, Conn., U.S.) cutters was reduced. Simpler ply extraction and kitting significantly reduced the chance of errors during cutting, which also translates into reduced waste during manufacturing.

In fact, minimizing waste was a large part of the motivation behind Joby’s time study. It revealed that the amount of waste collected during the woven twill material cutting was significantly higher than the TX-45 material, largely due to the splicing requirement for the woven material. Although the splices were nested to minimize waste, there was still an uneven number of splice sections with angled shapes that contributed toward scrap sections.

Nesting for two-ply sequence (+45 and -45) of woven 0°/90° fabric.

Meanwhile, A&P’s TX-45 material showed significantly lower waste collection. NIAR engineers were able to carefully nest the plies during cutting to gain maximum advantage of the roll and ended up with approximately 25% waste when extracting plies. By contrast, cutting and kitting traditional 0°/90° woven fabric prepreg can yield up to 40% waste. 

Kitting of +/-45° plies using TX-45 braided fabric.

Overall, the team noticed a significant reduction in labor to complete the part laid up with TX-45 braided material, compared to the part laid up with the traditional prepreg. In addition, Joby reported that the amount of skill required to complete the fabrication task was lower with TX-45, suggesting simplified layup for production efforts.

The quest for simplicity and efficiency

Ultimately, the time study conducted by the partners suggested an approximate 40% reduction in waste and labor through the use of TX-45. Hand layup of the braided TX-45 was simplified, required less technician effort in less time, and produced a better part. The final layup comprised eight uninterrupted plies of TX-45, while the traditional 0°/90° prepreg required 32 splices to achieve the same length and thickness.

Mechanical testing performed by Toray in tandem showed a strong level of equivalency between prepreg produced with the TX-45 braided fabric and prepreg using more traditional 0°/90° twill weave fabric.

“We were really impressed with the quality of the TX-45 braided fabric,” says Russell Kirkman, materials science engineer compositesfor Toray. “It was really easy to prepreg, and the quality of our prepreg came out really good. The initial mechanical testing we did to screen the material for equivalency to the traditional woven twill material was closely in line. So we were really happy with the results. Ultimately, the goal is to have this be a form, fit and function alternative to the standard twill, and everything that we’ve done in the prescreening is pointing towards that being a possibility.”

According to Joby advanced development staff engineer, John Gerigius, there are many advantages to further exploring use of the TX-45 braided material, including reduction in cycle times, reduced weight in parts and a reduction in the number of splices needed, which translates to a reduced number of inspection points — all leading to increases in production efficiency. “This truly should be an industry standard,” he says.

“There were a lot of benefits all around,” Stamper adds, “If we look at the entire global urban mobility industry, it’s only possible if we reduce the overall cost of the aircraft. Being able to bring part cost down by X factor because we’re wasting less material and doing it by using a material like TX-45 that is simple to use — these are huge gains that don’t require a lot of difficulty to get there.”

Kennametal’s HiPACS drilling and countersinking tool is engineered for high-precision machining, enhancing efficiency and accuracy in aerospace manufacturing. Source (All Images) | Kennametal

Enhancing performance and building lighter, stronger components has been a driving forces in the aerospace industry, which has motivated manufacturers to push the limits of innovation. This includes designing tooling solutions for drilling rivet holes in carbon fiber-reinforced polymer (CFRP) composites, including thermosets or thermoplastics, for use in fuselages, spoilers, wing skins and other vital components.

Global tooling company Kennametal (Pittsburgh, Pa., U.S.) says it understands the intricacies of complex rivet hole drilling — especially when machining layered stacked plates. With global demand for CFRP increasing thanks to its significant lightweighting benefits, some machining challenges can come into play including frequent tool changes and setups. Kennametal is continuously developing cutting tool systems that provide increased performance to overcome those challenges and meet industry requirements.

Challenges of drilling rivet holes in composites

Drilling rivet holes is often performed in CFRP or CFRP-hybrid material stacks (such as with aluminum or titanium). Machining CFRP can be challenging due to their abrasive and anisotropic nature; the strength and stiffness of the material changes based on fiber direction and how the composite is layered. Drilling through these materials often leads to delamination, fiber pullout or even hole misalignment if not managed correctly. Therefore, it becomes paramount that chip control and tight tolerances are maintained, fiber damage is avoided and burr formation is minimized to preserve workpiece integrity.

There are several ways to ensure users achieve the best outcome for drilling composites, including removing material in smaller increments, using the proper tools and feed rate, and optimizing the drilling cycle to ensure a clean hole.

“To tackle the challenges of machining composites, it’s crucial to employ strategies that enhance precision and maintain the quality of the workpiece,” says Steve Gray, Kennametal technical program manager – CFRP and aerospace assembly and future solutions engineering. “Consider using specialized tools, adjusting your machining parameters and refining your process to achieve optimal results.” 

One issue with stacked laminates is maintaining sharp cutting edges, which reduces the force required to machine, minimizing the risk of burr formation and delamination. It is also important to watch for wear in the tool, which can cause excessive friction and generate more heat, leading to higher risks of delamination and fiber pullout. Using diamond-coated or polycrystalline diamond (PCD) drills can increase cutting performance and tool life when machining multi-material stacks, making it much easier to maintain tight tolerances. 

Another possible aid is to use a pecking cycle (also known as peck drilling or peck milling). This technique uses multiple, shallow passes instead of one deep pass and is an effective way to remove chips and maintain low temperatures in a CFRP/metal stack. It prevents the hole from accumulating metal chips which could erode the CFRP as they exit. It also prevents tool overheating, which prevents the resin from reaching its glass transition temperature which could damage the composite workpiece.

Indeed, heat buildup is a major factor that can damage the part, as explained above, but also reduces the lifespan of cutting tools. Notably, thermoplastic composites are less prone to delamination but more susceptible to heat buildup and deformation during drilling. Meanwhile, thermoset composites have excellent thermal stability and will not melt under high temperatures, but the heat generated during drilling can still cause thermal degradation and affect the composite’s mechanical properties. CFRP-titanium hybrid composites pose further issues by requiring techniques that deal with both materials.

Employing coolant strategies is another option to manage temperature control. For example, providing minimum quantity lubrication (MQL) on the cutting edge of the tool can reduce friction and heat buildup.

Sustainable solutions for an eco-friendly environment

In addition to improved composites cutting efficiencies, cutting tool suppliers are also making sustainability a top priority — that is, finding solutions that minimize waste and reduce energy consumption. The MQL technique is ideal for minimizing waste — by applying a specific amount of lubrication directly to the cutting zone of a rivet hole while drilling, the amount of coolant fluid used is significantly reduced. Cryogenic cooling using liquid CO₂ is another effective method to reduce heat at the cutting edge of the tool. This technique keeps the tool extremely cold, which helps reduce tool wear and maintain the cutting edge for a longer period. 

“We are regularly approached by customers who ask for ways to reduce their carbon footprint,” says Georg Roth, global portfolio manager – drilling and threading tools at Kennametal. “This goes for everything from improving tool life and reducing carbide consumption to the use of recycled package material.”

Along with using edge inserts to prevent waste or using modular toolholder systems, reconditioning and regrinding services aim to restore existing cutting tools for longer service life. This contributes to sustainability by using less material and leads to the reduction of cost per hole.

Kennametal cutting tool solutions, featuring advanced end mills and drills, offer improved performance and precision for machining composite materials.

Improving design and performance

As drilling tools and techniques continue to advance, the integration of materials like CFRP and thermoplastics has led to significant innovations in Kennametal’s technology for rivet hole drilling layered material stacks.

The modular drill, for example, offers high rigidity and can be used on a variety of materials. The ultra-high polished flutes achieve efficient chip evacuation, and the coupling is completely protected from chip flow and contact with the workpiece.

Split point fiber (SPF) solid carbide drills offer a material-specific design to machine composites and composites stacks. The multilayered chemical vapor deposition (CVD) diamond coating provides increased tool life with high wear resistance. A 90°-point angle design increases the centering capability of the cutting tool and minimizes delamination.

Double angle (DAL) drills tackle CFRP-metal stack drilling operations. The double-angle point design offers optimal centering capabilities and minimizes burrs when exiting the metal side of the stack. DAL drills can be applied in all stack combinations: CFRP-titanium-aluminum (CFRP-Ti-Al) as well as CFRP-Ti, CFRP-Al and straight Ti or Al. Highly polished chip flutes ensure optimal chip evacuation, even when MQL is applied.

The correct drill point geometry is also crucial in rivet hole drilling, as it ensures accurate hole diameters and alignment, effectively reduces heat and facilitates efficient chip removal — ultimately resulting in stronger structural integrity in the aircraft. 

Kennametal performed a carbon fiber-titanium stack drilling Ti6Al4V (3.7164) exit burr analysis to compare burr size results using a universal drill geometry (top) versus drilling with Kennametal’s DAL geometry (bottom). Burr size was ≤ 0.48 millimeter and ≤ 0.06 millimeter, respectively.

The drilling and countersinking tool is another high-precision system, achieving 1° angular countersink tolerances in aerospace fastener hole applications. Designed to be clamped in a standard hydraulic chuck, HiPACS consists of three standard components: a reducer sleeve with a built-in high-precision pocket seat for a countersinking insert, a PCD countersinking insert, and solid carbide or PCD drills with SPF and DAL point geometry. This easy-to-assemble system can be used to drill and chamfer in one operation. Each component can be exchanged independently from one another, so only the worn piece can be replaced while the others can continue to be used.

HiPACS precision tooling system insert sits inside the flute to enable optimal formation of the transition radius/chamfer, preventing a step between the hole and countersink. Additionally, the system’s flexibility can reduce the inventory in traditional monoblock tools. The straight shank enables height adjustment within 10 millimeters. This precision system offers clearance which allows the drill to maintain runout of 3-5 microns.

In a practical application, a Tier 1 aerospace supplier was looking to reduce the costs and complexity of its monoblock assemblies. Kennametal stepped in and replaced the existing monoblock tooling assemblies with the company’s HiPACS system, which achieved lowest cost per hole and resulted in a significant line-item reduction.  

Kennametal’s HiPACS precision tooling system depicting where the insert height can be adjusted.

A pilot can help

Rivet heads must not protrude above the airplane’s skin, as this would create turbulence and drag. Instead, a flush surface is achieved by countersinking, which enables the rivet head to sit level with the surface. Due to accessibility challenges with machinery and equipment, countersinking operations often have to be done manually. To solve that challenge, S piloted PCD countersinks are designed for ease of handling in manual countersinking applications. Accuracy in depth control is provided by the microstop unit. This allows the countersink to provide consistent quality when machining.

The future of rivet hole drilling

Rivet hole drilling is a critical process in aerospace manufacturing and the shift toward composites is pushing the advancements of cutting tool technologies. Keeping that in mind, Kennametal sees new directions for composites holemaking. Sensors, for example, are being developed to guide, monitor and adjust as drilling operations are in-process to prevent wear on the tool and damage to the material. This would be done in real time and not only optimize the holemaking process but also improve efficiencies.

For example, Kennametal has recently been collaborating with a customer on a “one way assembly” project which involves developing sensor-based technology aimed at streamlining stack drilling in aircraft assembly. By using sensors to ensure holes meet specifications, the need for cleaning, disassembly and inspection could be eliminated, saving significant time and cost of aircraft components.

The aerospace industry’s drive for better performance and lighter components has led to cutting tool innovations and will continue to do so as the demand for CFRP grows.

About the Author

Christopher Stewart

Christopher Stewart is the global composite lead at Kennametal (Pittsburgh, Pa., U.S.), where he has spent the last 6 years as a composite applications specialist in the aerospace and defense market. Prior to his work with Kennametal, Stewart was an upstream manufacturing engineer in the medical device market. He began his engineering career in the automotive industry with a Tier 1 supplier, serving in cross-functional roles across the organization where he developed a strong understanding of the manufacturing process, from material entry to product exit.Stewart graduated from Kettering University with a Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering. chris.stewart@kennametal.com

Italian startup Levante has developed custom and standardized solar panels integrating recycled carbon fiber (rCF), thermoplastics and silicon solar cells to maximize both light weight for portability and rigidity for durability and protection while in use on boats, recreational vehicles (RVs) or other applications. Source | Levante

(Bari, Italy) was founded in 2021 by husband and wife team Kim Myklebust and Sara Plaga. They loved traveling by recreational vehicle (RV) and boat with their growing family and saw an opportunity to develop a lighter, more efficient portable solar panel to provide auxiliary power to travelers.

Myklebust, whose experience included a role as a design engineer for Formula One vehicles, recognized right away that carbon fiber composites would provide the mix of light weight and durability needed.

The first design, launched in 2022, was a foldable, origami-inspired concept (see video below) that maximized available surface area — to collect as much solar energy as possible — and compactness for portability and storage.

Myklebust says that this design was based on the high-performance origami solar panel arrays that NASA and others in the space industry have developed for satellite applications — in this case, intended as a smaller, affordable solution for the consumer market. “It all started with wanting to produce as much power from the smallest format possible,” he says.

In 2022, the first working prototype was tested by sailing duo/content creators Sailing Uma, which had previously used heavy, rigid solar panels and were seeking a lighter option that produced more power. 

Since achieving success with the Saling Uma prototype, Levante has had several collaborations and deliveries. The panels’ design has also continued to evolve. In addition to its custom origami-inspired panels, the Levante team began adapting its technology into a more standardized version. In late 2024, the company launched a new product line featuring square 13- and 55-watt semi-rigid panels, and a rectangular 110-watt semi-rigid panel.

“The idea is taking the modularity aspect of the origami into more standardized shapes that are common in the market, only ours are 40% lighter than other semi-rigid panels on the market today [that are] reinforced with aluminum or even other composite sheets, with the same rigidity thanks to the composite material used. It wouldn’t be possible without that,” Myklebust says.

What materials used for the panels? Early on, Levante identified carbon fiber as the best option, but there were some obvious challenges. “We thought of carbon fiber composites because we needed a rigid material under the solar cell for protection, as well as durability to match the 25-plus-year expected lifespan of the ultra-thin, high-efficiency silicon solar cells,” Myklebust explains. “However, the challenge when integrating carbon fiber into a solar panel is that it conducts electricity. You have to understand how to isolate it in the most efficient way possible, and that’s very challenging. In addition to the fiber, the thermoplastic resin needs to adhere properly to the other materials used in the lamination process.”

In addition to these technical challenges, Levante also recognized that using virgin carbon fiber processed from fossil fuels would undermine the inherent environmental focus of manufacturing solar panels.

So, Levante began not only looking into carbon fiber, but into recycled carbon fiber (rCF). “One thing I also knew from working with composites is that there can be a lot of waste. You have this beautiful scrap material that could be reused for something, you just need to find applications for it,” Myklebust says.

In late 2022, Myklebust and Plaga approached startup ReCarbon (Legnano, Italy) seeking a rCF solution for their foldable solar panel design.

As reported previously by CW senior technical editor Ginger Gardiner, ReCarbon was founded in 2022 and manufactures rCF intermediate products in both thermoset and thermoplastic formats, including Replate organosheets, thermoset epoxy prepreg and Recomb composite sandwich panels. ReCarbon incorporates rCF supplied by various partners in the recycling value chain. 

When ReCarbon began working with Levante, “we spent about a year in testing, trying to solve the electrical and material compatibility challenges and solving technical solutions to achieve the desired result. In the end, we found a way to keep the material together, and now it’s on the market,” Patrick Pacchetti, project manager at ReCarbon, explains.

The selected material is one of ReCarbon’s rCF/polypropylene (PP) Replate products. “It’s an organosheet that is thermoformable. In addition to this application we’ve also used these for automotive underbody panels, wheel houses and parcel shelves,” Pacchetti says. “It isn’t totally custom-made per application, but we can offer specific polymers, aerial weights and so on to meet customers’ requirements.”

Why a thermoplastic? “Thermoplastics are thermoformable and more easily recyclable in the end-of-life process, but they also help enable the bonding with the other applied materials,” Pacchetti explains. 

“With the rCF, you have the rigidity, the lightness and also the environmental benefit,” Myklebust adds. “You’re always trying to find the right compromise between lightness and rigidity. And that’s where we went back and forth with different materials, but when you use ReCarbon’s rCF composite, the porous nature of the carbon fiber sheet ends up working as a sort of core material, which adds rigidity as well.”

How are the panels manufactured? The production versions of Levante’s panels are manufactured in partnership with solar panel specialist Solbian (Avigliana, Italy), in a lamination process integrating the silicon solar cells directly onto the carbon fiber panels. Myklebust explains that the process is similar to thermoforming, involving laying up the materials at a specified temperature and under vacuum to apply negative pressure, but without the use of a mold.

“The idea is to laminate the carbon fiber composites into the solar panel [directly] to make it as rigid as possible without a significant weight penalty, because the rigidity protects the solar cells from cracking. It’s very important for the durability of the panel,” he says.

Today, Levante’s custom services and standardized panels are available via its website, and have been used for a variety of marine and RV applications to power auxiliary and lifestyle applications like lighting, refrigerators, computers or other devices.

Beyond selling its current solar panels, Levante continues to test the limits of what rCF composite solar panels can do. For example, the company is working on an EU-funded R&D project with local carbon fiber composites manufacturer (Tortoreto, Italy), to expand its solar panel technology including the incorporation of bio-based resins and curved geometry suitable for applications like car roofs or other vehicle exteriors.

Another goal is to build solar panels large and efficient enough to power an entire electric sailing boat. Myklebust says, “We’re going to completely power a sailing boat when it comes to propulsion and living consumption. Thanks to the rigidity of our panels, we can put them on arches or other places where there is no rigid support to put them, and a flexible type of panel on the deck. We’ll also have an extending version of the rCF panels, thanks to the rigidity, that will extend to the side of the boat. Normally, solar panels installed on a boat would — because of the limited space on where to install them — only power normal living consumptions like navigation navigation, lighting, charging your phone, the computer, etc. But we’re going to have enough solar panels to power an electric motor.”

The Composites Fabricating Index saw a small blip in the expansion seen the last two months, dropping 0.6 point. Source (All Images) | Gardner Intelligence

The Gardner Business Index (GBI) is an indicator of the current state of composites fabricating considering survey responses regarding new orders, production, backlog, employment, exports and supplier deliveries. Over 50 is expansion. Under 50 is contraction.

The Composites Fabricating Index registered a reading oft 51.4 in March, dropping less than one point from it’s February position. This activity suggestions that the composites market is still experiencing growth and is in a good position. Gains in new orders and backlogs were offset by declines in employment and exports, although all components improved from their readings in March 2024. The Future Business Index remains secure despite stepping back from the high readings seen the last two months amid economic concerns andtariff uncertainty.

The GBI Future Business Index is an indicator of the future state of the composites fabrication market industry respondents regarding their opinion of future business conditions for the next 12 months. Over 50 is expansion and under 50 is contraction.

Find the latest composites fabrication market research and reporting at GardnerIntelligence.com

Arash Shadravan is part of the Roboze team working to aid adoption of polymer composite materials such as carbon fiber polyetheretherketone (PEEK) in oil and gas manufacturing. PEEK components in oil and gas are often machined from solid. Particularly when the component is large, additive manufacturing (AM) can offer a quicker and cheaper way to obtain the same part.

That equivalence between aerospace and oil and gas manufacturing, as evocative as it is, also hints at other similarities. Dr. Shadravan and I recently spoke about this when I visited Roboze’s North American headquarters in Houston, Texas. For example, both aerospace and oil and gas rely on manufactured hardware that has to perform in demanding applications. Both also rely on manufacturing processes that are subject to well-defined industry standards.

But here is a difference: Aerospace is farther along in its acceptance — that is, in its standards’ acceptance — of AM. But the relatively new (published 2023) American Petroleum Institute Standard 20T, covering “Additively Manufactured Polymer-Based Components for Use in the Petroleum and Natural Gas Industries” (API 20S is the comparable standard for metal), creates a framework for bringing polymer 3D printed parts into oil and gas applications.

That framework is apt to advance one more similarity between aerospace and oil and gas parts. Namely, thanks to 3D printing, we will likely see polymer composites finding greater use in oil and gas components as replacements for what might formerly have been metal parts.

Some of the polymer AM machines running at the Houston Roboze facility are seen here. All these machines are fed by filament material. The company also offers deposition-style AM machines using granulate material.

Shadravan is on the front lines of this in various ways. Formerly of oil producer ExxonMobil and oil and gas equipment maker Baker Hughes before joining Roboze, he cochaired the committee that worked to develop the API 20T standard. (The committee chair, Enzo Savino, nonmetallics principal engineer with oil producer ConocoPhilips, has in mind .) Meanwhile, the Roboze system Shadravan helps to apply is an example of an industrial 3D printing platform capable of both repeatably producing hardware for oil and gas downhole applications and doing so within the framework of the 20T standard — notably by providing for process traceability.

An example of a large carbon fiber-reinforced PEEK part made more cost-effectively through AM. The fitting is seen here both before and after thread machining. In a video filmed at Roboze's facility, I discuss this part and other examples of 3D printed PEEK parts for oil and gas applications — see below.

Hard, rugged polymer composite materials are already in use for oil and gas components. Carbon fiber-reinforced polyetherether-ketone (PEEK) is a prominent example. This material offers multiple advantages over metal parts, the most notable of which is corrosion resistance surpassing that of even stainless steels. Steel parts needing regular replacement due to corrosion can be given a much longer service life by substituting reinforced PEEK parts. PEEK family materials also provide electrical insulation and lubricity, valuable to downhole (and some surface) equipment applications.

Today, these composite parts are generally machined. That imposes limitations. Obtaining a large billet of reinforced PEEK from which to machine a large component can be challenging, so oil and gas composite parts tend to be either size limited or subject to delay. 3D printing’s advantage for parts such as these invariably involves improved lead time. Here, there is a stark departure from the comparison with aerospace manufacturing. For aerospace, AM routinely involves intricate geometries for complex fluid flow or lightweighting applications peculiar to aircraft. But 3D printing for oil and gas, particularly polymer composite applications, is much more likely to involve geometrically simple components that could instead be machined.

Shadravan discusses with me some of the machine features enabling repeatable 3D printing. One element is visible lower down: a separate material dryer for each of four spools of filament (here, two spools of part material and two spools of support material).

Roboze offers polymer deposition 3D printing systems employing both filament and granulate stock. Several features help equip the machine to repeatable production of engineered hardware for downhole applications. A build chamber held to a consistent high temperature suited to the polymer material, combined with a high-performance dryer for (in the case of filament) each material spool, controls for in-process state changes and moisture, two variables that would otherwise affect the form and dimensions of the part as it is being printed. Rack-and-pinion machine motion also aids precision, enabling 0.004-inch tolerances on printed parts, the company says. The frequent result is polymer parts suited for use in their as-printed state. To help validate this, a standard output of the Roboze control is a traceability report documenting relevant process conditions throughout any part’s build. This kind of traceability aligns with API 20T, and it is a requirement of oil and gas manufacturing standards in general.

That said, there is still work to do, says Shadravan — he and others advancing polymer AM in this sector have their work cut out for them. At best, composites are somewhat accepted for oil and gas hardware, and 3D printing less so. When it comes to the latter, he says, many have been disappointed by 3D printed parts in the past, or they associate the term with less robust machines. Another big difference from aerospace is important here: In oil and gas, manufacturing does not necessarily occur in a controlled plant, but often may be in a remote field location. The part thus has to be rugged not just to perform its intended function, but to get to the point of use. Common 3D printed polymers will not do, Shadravan notes.

“The part will have to go to West Texas,” he says. “It has to bake in the sun without melting.” But now, a standards framework, combined with industrialized 3D printing capability for polymer composite components, is bringing a very different possibility. The result is likely to be greater oil and gas adoption of AM and adoption of composites together.

More From This Author

Peter Zelinski reports on the advance of 3D printing for industrial production as editor-in-chief of . Find his work in , in The BuildUp newsletter, and on , which he co-hosts.

Carmelo Lo Faro. Source | Syensqo

A year ago, the composites industry lost a young, dynamic, energetic and accomplished leader who made a significant impact on the people and companies he worked for and with. Here, ÂÌñÏ×ÆÞ looks back on the life, legacy and work of Carmelo Lo Faro. Through interviews with former colleagues, customers and friends, we found in Lo Faro a rare combination of engineering expertise and passionate leadership that fostered deep respect for his work, about the promise of composite materials and, perhaps most importantly, the people he worked with. He leaves behind colleagues and customers profoundly impacted by his service to the industry, his mentorship and friendship.

A problem-solver and an innovator

Lo Faro, who grew up and was educated in Italy, had known about composite materials and manufacturing from a relatively young age, primarily through his interest in space travel and the U.S. Space Shuttle program. However, it wasn’t until the late 1990s that Lo Faro first entered the composites industry. After he completed his undergraduate work, he was offered a position in ICI Fiberite’s industrial trainee program. Through that, he had his Ph.D. in education in Sicily sponsored by the company, a supplier of prepregs, tapes, molding compounds and thermoplastic materials, with particular focus on aerospace applications. In 1997, ICI sold its Fiberite business to competitor Cytec. With Ph.D. in hand, Lo Faro joined Cytec in 1998 at the company’s facility in Wilton, U.K. His first supervisor was Rob Maskell, chief scientist.

Maskell says one of the first projects he put Lo Faro on revolved around polymer chemistry — not an obvious fit given Lo Faro’s engineering education. Still, Maskell wanted to see what Lo Faro could do. The project involved an experiment that the chemists on staff at Cytec said could not be done. “Carmelo,” Maskell says, “was tenacious enough to make it work. He wasn’t a chemist, but he was a problem-solver and a doer. And he got it done.”

After that, Maskell says, he recognized in Lo Faro two other attributes that he took quick advantage of. First, Lo Faro was highly adaptable and willing to try new things — new technologies, new applications to make parts. Second, Lo Faro was excellent with customers. Because of this, Maskell started embedding Lo Faro within customer facilities to kick off application engineering projects.

Around 2000-2001, Lo Faro transitioned into a full-time role at Cytec. Maskell says that as his working relationship with Lo Faro evolved, Lo Faro’s business acumen became more apparent and more valuable. As a result, Maskell tended to focus on academic and technical responsibilities while Lo Faro handled customer-facing responsibilities. It was during this time that Maskell began to see Lo Faro’s interpersonal skills more clearly. “Carmelo was always willing to display his honest openness,” Maskell says. “If he didn’t know the answer to something, he would admit it — and then find the answer. And he always asked for advice. He didn’t always need it, but he asked for it anyway.”

A visionary leader

Also working for Cytec at the time was Patricia Harrison, currently head of business operations at Syensqo. She was in a business development role at the time but had a background as a chemist. She first met Lo Faro via Maskell when Lo Faro joined Cytec as an intern. “Rob always introduced the new scientists and engineers,” Harrison says. “Carmelo made an impression. He was a whirling dervish, always running around the labs. He was a fireball of energy. This guy was different in all the right ways.”

Harrison says Lo Faro earned a reputation for challenging the status quo and aggressively seeking innovative solutions to vexing challenges. “Carmelo had no chains,” she says. “He was a challenger and he was outspoken. He was often sent in to address the most difficult problems with our most important customers. We would not have gotten as far as we did without him.”

One of those challenging products was Cytec’s Priform, an epoxy hardener in fiber form that dissolved on contact with epoxy. Lo Faro was tasked with working out tooling solutions for Priform, how it might be applied and the manufacturing process best suited for it (RTM, it turns out). On top of that, all of this was done not as an R&T project, but a real-life parts manufacturing process. “It was about how to make parts,” Maskell says, “for customers like Boeing, FACC and others. This was not a pilot project and required significant Cytec investment.”

Carmelo Lo Faro in Cytec lab in Wilton, U.K., 1998.  Source | Syensqo

A family man and influential mentor

Another person who met Lo Faro in his very early days, before Cytec, was Marc Doyle. Doyle is currently VP of the composites material business for Syensqo and does commercial front-end, engineering, marketing, sales, demand management and other customer-facing work for the company. Doyle says he first met Lo Faro in 1998-1999 — before Doyle joined Cytec — at the Swiss Federal Technology Institute of Lausanne (EPFL) when Lo Faro “came barging in” holding a tray that contained a new resin system — one Lo Faro had named after his wife. “He was so enthusiastic and ambitious,” Doyle says. “But he was also a family man. He loved his family and he loved his work.”

Doyle, after a few years, left his job, but then joined Cytec in 2003, where he worked with Lo Faro doing application engineering. “We literally worked side-by-side for 15 years,” Doyle says. “We were the first application engineers that Cytec had and we did everything together. I think I spent more time with him than my wife and parents combined.”

Doyle adds: “Carmelo always had great ideas — especially for aerospace applications — and had the ability to sell them. And if we both agreed an idea was good, he would sell it and then I stepped in with a team of colleagues to make it happen. It was a very fun time.”

An example of this Doyle points to was when Cytec endeavored to become a second-source supplier of primary structure prepreg for the Boeing 777X. “Honestly, nobody believed that was possible,” Doyle says. “We were up against some unusual forces in that case, but Carmelo was able to sell the idea. I mean, straight up to the CTO of Boeing. So that’s an example of the kind of idea that I think only somebody like him can turn what would be more of a dream for most people, into reality.”

To this day, says Doyle, he still finds himself looking at problems, challenges and ideas through a Lo Faro lens. “His influence, to me personally, is everlasting,” Doyle says. “Not a day goes by that I don’t think about how Carmelo would think or do or say or feel about a certain situation. And, more often than not, I come out with pretty decent insight. I don’t know if that’s me or him or what, but it makes me look at the topic in a clear, simple, more essential way.”

Lo Faro earned a series of promotions up the ladder and into other Cytec facilities, including the company’s manufacturing plant in Wrexham, Wales. Throughout this time, Maskell and Harrison say, Lo Faro kept in touch with his mentors. “He was intensely loyal,” Maskell says. “And he expected loyalty in return. He and I remained very close throughout his career.”

Harrison, looking back, recalls telling Lo Faro one day in Tempe, “Carmelo, we’ll all be working for you someday.” She was right.

It was at Wrexham that Lo Faro’s people skills, already apparent, became     more prominent. The Wrexham facility produces resin systems, adhesives and other chemical components of composite materials. In his work, Lo Faro was tasked with a variety of jobs that took him all over the plant, interacting not just with other engineers and management personnel, but the workers themselves managing the machinery and materials. Maskell says Lo Faro’s gregariousness and outgoing nature helped him make quick friends with everyone.

“Carmelo was famous, from very early on,” says Maskell, “for stopping to talk to everyone in the facility, from the custodian to the plant manager. And it wasn’t just talk. He got to know them — their history, their families, their interests. And then he remembered them and when he saw them again. This was highly unusual and highly appreciated by everyone he worked with.”

Lo Faro himself references this in a 2020 interview on a CW Talks podcast: “I have a simple belief that your knowledge matters a lot less than your attitude and your behaviors. And what this means is that, at the end of the day, whenever we have people that have demonstrated the right behaviors, the right attitude, the right leadership, I think we can put these people on almost every project.”

An inspiring and empowering leader

Another of Lo Faro’s close colleagues was Eddy Depase, currently head of marketing and NBD at Syensqo. Depase says he met Lo Faro a few times before 2009, once at Ferrari and once at Boeing. Then, in 2010, Depase was working at Boeing and was approached by Carmelo to discuss employment opportunities at Cytec. He was on vacation when he got a call from Lo Faro. “He offered me a job,” Depase says. “I refused it, but as soon as I put down the phone, I realized I had made a mistake. I called him back and accepted. It was more of an instinct thing. Carmelo’s vision and attitude made me reconsider and it was the best decision for me. He had a  way of bringing people together and I wanted to be a part of that.”

Depase was hired into the Applications group. In this role, he discovered a quality of Lo Faro’s that was cherished and not often recognized. “Carmelo’s leadership style was to delegate, but support, and that’s something I really appreciated,” Depase says. “He trusted me with responsibility, but he never left me hanging. There’s a fine balance to this type of management style.”

Depase also echoes the sentiment others shared about Lo Faro’s connection to colleagues. “He always had time for his employees,” adds Depase. “Always. Even when he was president of an organization of thousands of people, I could send him a note and say, ‘Carmelo, I want to talk to you’ or ‘I want to touch base with you.’ Within that same afternoon he would find time to call me. Always.”

Depase and Doyle agreed that Lo Faro’s enthusiasm for an idea or a project or a mission was contagious and empowering. “A lot of people that were part of his teams, where he had a vision, would have gone through a wall for him,” Depase says. “It was a combination of his personality, his vision, the fact that he was there with you, the fact that you felt empowered, you felt that he valued your opinion and that he listened to your opinion. That made me incredibly proud when he would ask my opinion. A guy like him asking me my opinion, it was such an honor.”

Carmelo Lo Faro, third from right, receiving a Boeing Supplier of the Year Award for Solvay in 2022. Source | Syensqo

A champion of integrity and trust

During his work at Wrexham, Lo Faro worked across other Cytec facilities in Europe, focusing more on R&T, but still interacting with customers and other Cytec employees. It was during this time that he first intersected with Bill Wood, then general manager of Cytec Europe. Wood says that although Lo Faro was still relatively young, he’d already made a name for himself within the company. That said, Wood was not prepared to be as impressed as he was by Lo Faro. Wood says he brought to the company a rare combination of curiosity, intellect, energy and pure likeability that made everyone want to be part of what he was doing.

“What really impressed me about him was not just his intellectual capability and his capabilities in R&T, but he was just so curious and so interested,” Wood says. “He just wanted to understand the industry. He wanted to understand people. And then underpinning was just this infectious energy. I mean, people just wanted to be a part of his team — just wanted to be a part of the projects he was working on.”

This extended, says Wood, to customer relationships as well. Wood notes that there can be, in any supplier/customer relationship, a reluctance by the supplier to own mistakes that impact the customer and the customer’s product. He says Cytec was not immune to that tendency from time to time. In Lo Faro, however, Cytec had someone who wasn’t just passionate about composite materials, but passionate about seeing them succeed. And seeing them succeed meant being willing to acknowledge when they failed and taking the steps necessary to make them work.

“I’ll give you a generic example,” Wood says. “Let’s say you have a major customer experiencing a significant performance problem with your product. You might be able to help the customer tweak the process to solve the immediate problem. But there’s almost always an underlying cause that sometimes goes unaddressed. Carmelo wanted to address that cause. He would find a way to get all of us on board, dealing with the customer directly and honestly about the problem. He would give us the best chance to work through the challenge with them. This is not easy work, but it’s the kind of work that engenders great trust with the customer. And that’s the kind of trust Carmelo helped Cytec earn.”

Wood was promoted and moved back to Tempe. He asked Lo Faro to join him there as VP of technology. While back in Arizona, Lo Faro also returned to school, earning his MBA from the Thunderbird School of International Management at Arizona State University. In 2012, Cytec expanded its manufacturing and technology footprint with the acquisition of Umeco. This put Lo Faro in contact with a new group of composites professionals.

A legacy of inspiration

One of those was Claire Michel, currently marketing communications director at Syensqo, who handled communications at Umeco and then assumed the same role at Cytec. She first met Lo Faro in July 2012 in a series of meetings designed to integrate Umeco and harmonize the communication strategies of the newly joined companies.

“These meetings were uncomfortable and odd, you know — you are being acquired by a competitor. It’s not an easy feeling,” Michel remembers. “But in comes Carmelo, and he’s smiling, happy and showing interest in meeting new people. He was clearly senior and a decision maker yet very approachable from the very start. He was unlike anyone I’d ever met. Years later I was surprised to hear that he remembered that was the first time we met and his impression of me then.”

Michel worked with Lo Faro throughout the next 12 years and enjoyed a relationship with him that was, as others testified, unlike any other they had in their professional life: “I felt lucky to get to work with him and to have his trust. He regularly asked me for my opinion, for my insights in how the sites were doing and he involved me in strategic projects to lead on communication aspects. In return, he was very open with me, sharing advice and guidance as a senior company colleague and as a friend, which hugely helped me in my career. And I know he did the same for many others. He told me that each day he would first answer customer emails, then colleagues and then everybody else.”

Carmelo believed in communication — and valued the opportunity to communicate internally to foster the right culture and mindset. “Over the years I learned to think the way he thought and speak the way he did as I was writing many of his internal memos,” Michel continues. “This became critical during COVID-19 when I helped him stay close to his employees — teammates as he called them — through written and video messages.

“Everyone genuinely liked and respected him because he was so earnest and passionate — about composites, about the company, about the people he worked with, about his family, about life,” Michel says. “I considered him a friend and cherished any interaction I had with him. I never wanted to let him down.”

In 2015, Cytec was acquired by Solvay and became Solvay Composite Materials, headquartered in Alpharetta, Georgia. Two years later, in 2017, Wood retired and Lo Faro was promoted to president of Solvay Composite Materials.

Carmelo Lo Faro was an avid soccer (football) fan and in his spare time refereed youth soccer matches. Source | Patricia Harrison

Business savvy and customer-focused

Throughout his career, Lo Faro was extremely well known for his customer interactions and relationships, particularly in the aerospace and defense end markets. As colleagues above have testified, Lo Faro became famous for advancing new ideas, new technologies and new applications, building teams to bring those innovations to market. One of Cytec’s and, by extension Lo Faro’s, most important projects was the F-35, for which Syensqo is a primary material supplier.

Jeff Hendrix is a U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) consultant who has worked for more than 30 years on development of composite structures for major aircraft programs supporting the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Navy. He has worked, among others, with Northrop Grumman, Boeing and Lockheed Martin, and first intersected with Lo Faro around 2011. Lockheed Martin, manufacturer of the F-35, was making decisions about future materials needs and Hendrix was tasked with aligning Cytec with those needs. Lo Faro’s increasing roles with Cytec put him in more frequent contact with Hendrix.

Hendrix says Lo Faro was always keenly interested in how Solvay could do more to support DOD programs. “He really was a patriot of his adopted country in the U.S. He recognized that freedom comes at a cost and he was very keen on making sure that Solvay supported the defense business, even though in the grand scheme of things defense business is not near as big as the commercial aircraft business. He knew that not every decision was a dollars and cents, ROI, money decision and he was very good and very supportive of doing things that were incredibly helpful to the DOD side of the business.”

This philosophy turned into a desire Lo Faro developed to do the “right” thing, even if that right thing was not optimal for Solvay. “And that may not have been what Cytec’s contract called for,” Hendrix says. “He wasn’t the type who would say, ‘Well, that’s not what the contract says. The contract says this is what I have to do. You’re asking me to do something more so I’m not going to do it.’ If it was the right thing to do, Carmelo was always supportive and doing the right thing.”

Further, Lo Faro’s deep connection with his colleagues was apparent even to Hendrix, who was on the outside looking in. “You don’t always see that level of connectedness in leaders,” Hendrix says. “Particularly as you get to higher levels of the organization. Sometimes leaders tend to lose touch with the everyday workers. I don’t believe Carmelo ever did. So those are just sort of some of the things that I think made him special and unique.”

Also part of Lo Faro’s deep history is Vincent D’Arienzo, currently a Technical Fellow at Bell Helicopter. D’Arienzo and Lo Faro first met when Lo Faro was still in his Ph.D. program, but they maintained a professional and personal relationship throughout Lo Faro’s career. D’Arienzo’s first impression was that Lo Faro was extremely bright and fast learner, but he soon discovered deeper and more significant talents. D’Arienzo describes Lo Faro as a “whole person,” someone who shared openly his business, personal, family and career interests, and encouraged those he worked with to do the same. He remembers Lo Faro as a soccer-obsessed, energetic, family-oriented, visionary thinker who valued personal relationships above all else.

“He would take the time to talk to you personally about your personal life, your family life, your health, your career and then the business side came in,” D’Arienzo says. “He was genuine. If he knew you had a personal issue coming or something happening in your personal life, he would actually stay in contact. He was a remarkable person.”

D’Arienzo also notes that as Lo Faro rose through the ranks at Cytec and began to manage the company’s R&T efforts, he faced significant obstacles for which he seemed to be uniquely equipped to handle. First, says D’Arienzo, although Cytec was a carbon fiber producer, it did not produce much fiber. As a result, the company was compelled to work cooperatively with other fiber manufacturers, which was a strong suit of Lo Faro’s.

Second, although Cytec had a presence in the U.S., it was Lo Faro’s European connections that opened doors for the company there, “put Cytec on the map” and created the relationships that led, eventually, to the acquisition by Solvay.

Third, D’Arienzo says, especially after Lo Faro became president of Solvay Composites Materials, “Carmelo was not confined to short-term goals and quarterly financial targets and the Wall Street Model. He was always thinking long term and planning for a future that many of us could not yet see.”

Fourth, D’Arienzo very much respected how transparent Lo Faro was. “He was so focused on solutions and on helping the customer,” he says. “Carmelo would say, ‘We need you to work with us to solve this problem.’ Whatever it is. But he wanted to find the cause of the challenge, not the symptom. And he would ask you to work on that with him. There was sort of a transparency with Carmelo that a lot of suppliers just don’t often provide.”

Finally, he says, Lo Faro’s leadership created opportunities that are in short supply in the composites industry. “Carmelo was a bridge-builder,” D’Arienzo says. “He saw things — products, technologies — in other markets and applications and encouraged people like me to look for ways to apply those in other ways. Similarly, he brought companies together that don’t normally work together. He synergized a lot of different people. I watched him put together companies that don’t even talk to each other in the same room to work together.”

A lasting influence

Another colleague from the OEM community is Jeff Carpenter, senior director raw material supply chain at Boeing Commercial Aircraft. Carpenter first met Lo Faro around 2011 at a Boeing Supplier Conference in San Diego, California. Carpenter was new to his job at the time and was highly sought after by suppliers attending the event. Carpenter says there was one person — Lo Faro — who was most persistent. “Not rude or pushy, but just persistent,” he says. “Really persistent.” On top of that, Carpenter says, Lo Faro did not want to meet at the conference itself, but at a restaurant for lunch.

“I'm sitting outside in the little dining area on the sidewalk with a little fence around it,” Carpenter remembers. “And I see this nicely dressed guy looking around. I think this must be him. And I stood up and said, ‘Are you Carmelo?’ He hops over the fence, sits down and we start talking. That was my introduction to Carmelo.”

Two things, says Carpenter, struck him right away about Lo Faro: First, he was really smart. Second, he valued relationships. “Perhaps more so than anyone I’ve ever known in the aerospace supply chain,” Carpenter notes. “Right from the start, he didn’t want to meet in a business environment. He wanted to meet in a social setting. He wanted to have some quiet time over a meal. That was it.”

As this relationship evolved, Carpenter got to know and appreciate the strengths that Lo Faro brought to Boeing. “Boeing has a really very special tactical relationship with our three carbon fiber suppliers, Toray, Hexcel and Syensqo [Solvay became Syensqo in 2024],” Carpenter notes. “This is the kind of relationship that involves our chief technology officers. And Carmelo and his team were very personally engaged in these relationships. For example, he and they would come out and meet people like John Tracy, who was our CTO for many, many years. Carmelo made sure he had a sort of personal thumbprint on the key or big projects. That was a level of involvement we did not always get from a lot of leaders.”

The relationship Lo Faro established with Boeing culminated in 2022 with Solvay being named a Boeing Supplier of the Year. Carpenter says Solvay won that award not because Solvay excelled, but because Lo Faro had created an environment in which a failure was turned into a success for a customer. And that customer was Boeing.

“Solvay was actually performing badly,” Carpenter says, “because of supply chain shortages post-COVID. Getting base chemicals was just difficult for everybody. Solvay was not immune to that and they were suffering. Boeing offered to help and Carmelo said, ‘You bet. Come on in. Let’s work together.’ He was totally transparent. And before I knew it, I was on the phone with suppliers I’ve never heard of trying to help Solvay find magic chemical number four or input thing number two. And we solved the problem. And Solvay got the award because of their transparency. Most of the suppliers we work with are like, ‘Leave me alone. Let me just work it out and I’ll get back to you.’ That was not Carmelo.”

Ultimately, says Carpenter, he hopes that everyone — composites professionals and the Lo Faro family — can understand and appreciate that there is not a single Boeing aircraft that does not make use of a Syensqo material. “Every single aircraft. And we have Carmelo to thank for much of that.”

Carmelo Lo Faro, third from right, at a ribbon-cutting ceremony at the National Institute for Aviation Research (NIAR) at Wichita State University. Syensqo has a lab at NIAR. Source | Syensqo

Humility and respect

There is one person who stands out because he was not only a customer of Syensqo and Lo Faro, but a colleague as well. Gary Bond was, for many years, a Fellow at Boeing and worked on development of composite materials and processes for primary structures for military and commercial programs. Bond recalls meeting Lo Faro for the first time in the mid-2010s at a SAMPE conference. He was standing outside a ballroom after listening to the keynote speaker when Lo Faro walked up and introduced himself.

“I had heard his name and I kind of knew who he was from my Boeing colleagues,” Bond says. “But as soon as I met him, I felt like I had known him all my life. He just had that ability to connect with people and make you feel like you were his best friend and that you’ve known him for years. It’s kind of unusual, especially in the engineering world, that you have people with such skills, but he just made you feel like he had a deep, long relationship with you and was very interested in the stuff you had to say.”

One of the key materials that Bond and Lo Faro worked on was development of a resin system that would come to be called 5320-1, funded through a DARPA program called Non Autoclave Manufacturing Technology. Bond was the principal investigator on the program and saw the material become a baseline resin system for many composite defense applications.

Bond left Boeing in late 2020 and a month later joined Solvay, in part because of Lo Faro’s influence. At Solvay, Bond did not report directly to Lo Faro, but they did share ideas, and Lo Faro often sought Bond’s input on new materials, technologies and process developments.

“One of the things that I really respected about Carmelo was that although he was very smart, he recognized that he was better and smarter when he was surrounded by good people,” Bond recalls. “And so he would reach out to people to get their perspective on stuff to get their input. He was not afraid to draw on other people's expertise.”

One of Bond’s comments into Lo Faro’s modus operandi revolved around a strategy pilots use when executing flying maneuvers. Bond, who is a pilot himself, says, “In the piloting world, we have an expression that says, ‘slow is smooth and smooth is fast.’ The idea is that instead of making sudden changes to the control inputs, you do something nice and smooth and slow, and that ends up being a faster way to get there. I told Carmelo, ‘You need to kind of get that. Convey that to your people that we’re going to get there, but we’re not going to make these huge sudden changes. We’re going to do this deliberately and it’s going to end up being faster for us.’ Carmelo jumped all over that and he really bought into it. So, he was very open to other people’s inputs and willing to listen. That was one of the things I really enjoyed about my relationship with Carmelo.”

Exploring new horizons

In 2023, Bond left Solvay to join RTX affiliate Pratt & Whitney (P&W). Soon after, Lo Faro surprised the composites community at large, and Solvay colleagues in particular, by joining Bond at RTX and almost immediately after, P&W. This occurred just prior to Solvay’s demerger, that Lo Faro helped implement, which moved the company’s composites business into a new entity called Syensqo.

Bond says Lo Faro’s early days at P&W were a challenge. “Not long after he got there, they threw him into one of the toughest positions, I think, which was the powdered nickel metal problem that some turbines had,” says Bond. “This was not really his expertise, technically, but I think they recognized his leadership abilities and that he was the right guy for the job. I think it was an extremely high-stress job, but as usual, he attacked it with passion and jumped right in. He just wanted to learn everything he possibly could about the issues, both from a technical standpoint as well as how to work with the airlines and how to best convey what we are doing from a safety standpoint.”

Shane Eddy, president of P&W, had this to say about Lo Faro’s brief tenure at the company: “He purposely split his time between visiting key sites and meeting with members of the team on an individual basis. He went to great lengths to learn more about our people and our purpose. His experience and intentional leadership helped remove barriers and better positioned us for success in our efforts to recover the GTF program. Carmelo challenged us to build trust and relationships across various teams within the company. He instilled a structure and cadence to tiered engagement with our team that drove focus on the resources needed by the team to accomplish the mission. His passion for our team and our purpose was evident in every engagement, and he relentlessly championed inclusion, accountability and teamwork.”

The value of curiosity

Lo Faro’s 2020 CW Talks interview finishes with an answer to a question about curiosity and innovation. That answer is worth repeating here:

“It's been a long time since I was a child myself — I believe that children are inherently extremely curious; children are extremely excited by exploring and by solving problems. And you know, ultimately, they can be very happy. Every single day I’ve worked in this business has been the ability to do that, so what I really would like is that we help our children discover or rediscover that. Be excited about seeing a spaceship going to the moon, being excited about the engine of a fighter jet, being excited about having a plane that you can pilot from your room. That’s something that I believe will provide inspiration. And I think it is our job to inspire the younger generation and have them understand that, you know, ultimately, the answers to humanity’s problems are going to be [found] through science and technology. Nothing else.”

Every year JEC World provides insights into the latest technologies, processes and trends shaping the composites industry today. Source (All Images) | CW

JEC World is always a great way to gain insight into the trends influencing the composites industry. The 2025 installment of the international composites industry trade fair showcased the latest advancements in composites, emphasizing sustainability, automation and performance-driven innovations.

Much of the consensus at the show was that the aerospace industry remains in a transition phase, with growing interest in thermoplastic composites (TPC) and anticipation for the next-generation single-aisle aircraft. While neither Boeing or Airbus have yet to announce a next single-aisle program, composite materials, particularly TPC, are gaining traction in the aerospace sector. The supply chain is preparing for potential developments by 2030.

In the meantime defense and space industries continue to drive demand for high-performance composites, driven by geopolitical tensions and increased commercialization of space launches, respectively.

This large eVTOL propeller showcased by Albany Engineered Composites is just one example of a growing demand for high-performance propellers that reflects advancements in aerospace manufacturing. 

While the excitement surrounding urban air mobility (UAM) has slowed with numerous players pulling back from the market in 2024, forerunners such as Joby Aviation Inc. (Santa Cruz, Calif., U.S.), Archer Aviation Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif., U.S.) and Beta Technologies (South Burlington, Vt., U.S.) continue to make significant strides toward qualification of their respective aircraft. Additionally, a growing demand for high-performance propellers further reflect advancements in aerospace manufacturing. 

Automation and digitalization were also dominant themes at JEC World, with exhibitors highlighting AI-driven manufacturing and smart composite processing. The topic of sustainability also seemed to take center stage again this year, with emphasis on bio-based resins, recyclable composites and circular economy strategies.

Below you’ll find just a few examples from the trade show exhibits that reflected some of these trends.

This MTorres/Boeing industrial mobile robot (IMR), displayed at JEC World, is engineered to automate traditionally manual executed tasks working alongside humans to improve productivity and process quality, as well as to provide enhanced ergonomics for operators.

(Torres de Elorz, Spain) showcased an industrial mobile robot (IMR) that it co-developed with Boeing Co. (Arlington, Va., U.S.). The IMR is designed to automate traditionally manual executed tasks working alongside humans to improve productivity and process quality, as well as to provide enhanced ergonomics for operators. The platform uses LIDAR to navigate through a production environment autonomously, avoiding obstacles and personnel.

The IMR can be used with different production processes by automatically changing the end effector. The platform is equipped with a vision system for detecting the part and its features, and compensating for any deviation in part position. The IMR is driven by software that enables it to perceive the environment, move safely, make decisions and execute complex tasks.

Toray Advanced Composites displayed an ENVOL project composite upper stage tank for a small launch vehicle at JEC World. The tank was designed by CT Ingenierie and manufactured by Airborne using a novel method to integrate the outer shell with the tank and enable high-volume production.

Executives at Toray Advanced Composites (Morgan Hill, Calif., U.S.)  provided a comprehensive overview of emerging trends transforming advanced materials and manufacturing. The company noted significant growth in defense and space markets, particularly in missile defense and satellite technologies. With launch costs dramatically reduced, there’s increasing flexibility in material selection, enabling more cost-effective composite solutions across different applications.

Toray had a composite upper stage tank for a small launch vehicle, part of the European Newspace Vertical Orbital Launcher (ENVOL) project, on display. The aim of ENVOL is to create a commercially competitive launch system that offers Europe affordable, frequent and flexible access to space for small satellites. Central to this initiative is an environmentally friendly hybrid propulsion system powered by liquid hydrogen peroxide.

The tank on display was designed by CT Ingenierie (Colomiers, France) and manufactured by Airborne (The Hague, Netherlands) using high-performance, epoxy-based slit unidirectional tapes from Toray. Airborne combined its automated manufacturing technology with a novel method to integrate the outer shell with the tank to successfully produce a cost-effective component capable of high-volume production.

Taking into account material properties and automated fiber placement (AFP) fiber paths, the tank is reportedly able to withstand a maximum pressure of 12 bar and heavy loads during the launch.

In addition, Toray is actively exploring growth in other market segments, including sports equipment and industrial applications. By leveraging its aerospace-grade technology in consumer markets, the company aims to build brand recognition and further demonstrate the performance capabilities of its materials.

Web Industries vice president of aerospace Jason Surman and president/CEO John Madej.

Web Industries Inc. (Marlborough, Mass., U.S.), an advanced materials converter and outsource manufacturer, showcased its innovative approach to composite materials manufacturing, emphasizing flexibility, sustainability and market diversification with an eye toward emerging trends across aerospace, space, energy and industrial sectors.

The company is developing a next-generation slitting platform designed to provide unprecedented flexibility. The new platform can handle both thermoplastic and thermoset materials, accommodating various formats from quarter-inch spools to 2-inch pads. This adaptability positions Web to support evolving manufacturing needs across multiple industries. The company is actively exploring opportunities beyond traditional aerospace, with particular focus on the space sector, renewable energy, wind turbine blades, oil and gas infrastructure and emerging markets like UAM.

Sustainability is also part of Web’s message. The company’s splicing technologies are aimed at 100% material consumption, customizing material rolls to minimize waste and optimizing formatting to reduce packaging and transportation costs.

Syensqo’s Cycom 5320- thermoset resin system and its Thornel T650 fabric were used to manufacture carbon fiber coaxial tank components — part of Scottish launcher company Orbex’s BioLPG fuel system. 

Syensqo (Alpharetta, Ga., U.S.) showcased a coaxial (liquefied petroleum gas) LPG tank dome and liquid oxygen (LOX) sealing ring manufactured by Orbex (Scotland, U.K.). The components were manufactured using Syensqo’s Cycom 5320- thermoset resin system and its Thornel T650 fabric. The parts are featured on Orbex’s carbon fiber coaxial tank. The tank design is part of Orbex’s BioLPG fuel system, a system that uses a bio-based propane fuel that is said to reduce emissions by 90% compared to traditional launch fuels. Orbex’s components are designed to withstand cryogenic temperatures and are produced using various methods including hand layup and tape winding. The components are meant to be recoverable after each Stage 1 launch, further contributing to the goal of sustainable space exploration.