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(Unterhaching, Germany) reports that it has developed an industrial solution to improve the storage efficiency of Type IV composite tanks in hydrogen-powered electric vehicles (EVs), reducing the amount of carbon fibers consumed by up to 15% while maintaining equivalent mechanical properties.

Cevotec’s solution is to apply carbon fiber patches in the tank’s dome areas, thereby replacing the high-angle helical layers (HAHL) in a typical filament winding pattern. Reinforcing a tank’s dome area with its fiber patch placement (FPP) technology reportedly yields 15% in material, weight and cost savings, and shortens total manufacturing time by 20%. By using FPP dome reinforcements, Cevotec says that manufacturers need less material in the subsequent filament winding process. 

Cevotec’s fully automated, quality-controlled SAMBA FPP system first places the reinforcing fiber patches at the dome area directly on a standard liner. Then the patched liners are transferred over to the filament winding process; SAMBA requires no additional post-processing. The winding process is then adjusted to leave out the HAHL layers, for a faster, less material-intensive process, increasing overall line capacity for tanks, which further improves ROI and production economics