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Francesco Ierullo, VP sales and marketing, Exel Composites. Source | Exel Composites

In this installment of CW Talks, ÂÌñÏ×ÆÞ speaks with Francesco Ierullo, vice president of sales and marketing at Exel Composites (Vantaa, Finland). Ierullo started in Italy as a one-man team and now oversees Exel’s engineered composites business globally. He’s worked across Europe and the U.S. and played a key role in developing Exel’s conductor core program. CW sat down with Ierullo to hear about the role the company’s capabilities are playing in numerous applications today from renewable energy to data centers to electric vehicles, as well as to his insights into how the composites industry has grown over the past decade.

ÂÌñÏ×ÆÞ (CW): Tell us a bit about your background in composites and the evolution of the industry you’ve seen during your career.

Francesco Ierullo (FR): I graduated in mechanical engineering in Italy back in 2007 and I started working with a small Italian pultrusion firm as a production engineer. As my career progressed, I moved to Spain, still working with pultrusion, but more on the R&D side. I was developing thermoplastic pultrusion in an R&D center and worked on a number of projects. I learned that Exel was searching for some somebody to cover the Italian market, so I moved to sales. That was 2015. This year marks my 10^th year at Exel and 17 years in the composite industry — with most of that time working in the pultrusion business.

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In that time, I’ve seen this industry grow a lot — and let’s remember that if we compare composites to other standard construction materials, composites are still a fraction of the materials used — but it’s a very fast-growing industry and there is a lot of opportunity to grow [further].

Materials that we use today, such as high modulus carbon fibers and high-performance resins, were basically only used in very high-end applications like rocket science and aerospace just 15 years ago. Nowadays, we use composite materials for many everyday applications.

CW: Exel Composites specializes in pultrusion and pull-winding. Can you talk a bit about the markets you’re serving with those processes and the opportunities are you seeing?

FR: Pultrusion and pull-winding are a bit special compared to other composites manufacturing processes simply because of the fact that they are continuous. So, they bring in that factor of the long run long batches. Cost structure is more prone to volume applications.

Exel focuses on those two processes and we consider ourselves the largest composite profiles manufacturer in the world with a presence on three major continents — we’re in Europe, in Asia and in North America. The sectors where we mostly focus are the industrial sector and wind energy. So, energy generation, transportation (buses, trucks, trailers, train and trams). We work a lot in building and infrastructure, electrical generation and distribution, but we’re also involved in defense programs, telecommunication and industrial machinery and equipment.

When you talk about lightweight, high mechanics, thermal insulation, electrical insulation, radio transparency — these are good performance needs that composites enable. And for composites manufacturing, pultrusion and pull-winding products can bring economy of scale — they are a very good fit for volume applications.

CW: You’re involved in a lot of infrastructure and energy projects. Can you talk a bit about your strategy for serving some of these market sectors?

FR: We’ve been involved in the entire value chain in energy generation. We supply parts wind energy programs, such as spar caps (stiffeners for the wind blade manufacturing), as well as roof joints and other parts in a windmill — there is a lot of protrusion in windmills.

We also work in the utility pole space. There’s also a lot of space for composites in electrical insulating (there are pultruded parts in transformers), as well as power transmission side with conductor cores, which enables the distribution of the electricity.

CW: With regard to energy, can you talk about the evolution of some of these markets?

FR: We all know that wind energy has probably been the dominant and fastest growing trend in the entire composites industry. Exel has been participating in a number of initiatives in wind energy, as I said before.

A major trend for growth in the composites industry — and particularly for pultrusion — is conductor core. As you know, the demand for more efficient, reliable, sustainable electricity transmission is greater than ever. From electric vehicles to electronic devices, we depend on energy and electricity now more than ever. Transmission system operators need a cutting-edge solution to meet the challenges of increased and centralized electricity consumption. And there’s a problem with much of the infrastructure aging. Forty percent of the European grids or networks were built before the 1940s, and in the U.S. sometimes they are even older.

In addition, the use of AI, which is such a big trend, is consuming a lot of energy. So we need a lot of energy generation. That’s where conductor core comes in as a great solution.

Traditional conductors, which are normally called ACSR [aluminum conductor steel-reinforced conductors] have been used for 70 years. But, faced with these new challenges, they’re not the best solution anymore. Today, all the grid operators demand HTLS [high-temperature, low-sag conductors]. These products allow the increase of transmission capacity; they enhance the efficiency of the grid; they decrease transmission losses and reduce environmental impact. And all of this is basically possible because of the use of this composite carbon fiber-based conductor core, which is made by pultrusion. So, this is a real game-changer. The future of the energy transmission is relying on this concept.