JEC COMPOSITES MAGAZINE - Issue #118 - January/February 2018 - 40

SPORTS AND LEISURE
windfoil board

An innovative carbon non-crimp fabric
(NCF) for sports applications

PaSCal JouBert deS ouCheS,
Director of Composite Business for Asia
Chomarat

A

lmost all manufacturers of tubular carbon sports equipment like
rackets, bicycle frames, baseball
bats, golf clubs, fishing poles, or masts
depend on an old process that was a
benchmark in the industry more than
30 years ago: UD prepregs moulded
using an inflatable bladder inside the
tube. This process was optimized to
its fullest extent a long time ago, and
nothing really new on that front is likely
to emerge. Its limits are well known: too
much labour required for UD ply lay-up

NeilPryde RS:X convertible board

40

At Chomarat, we work closely with internationally renowned universities, research institutes and technical centres to develop the composite
materials of the future. The C-PLY™ range, designed in partnership
with Professor Tsai from Stanford University, is an example of our
innovation leadership.

and for the painstaking finishing operations after mould release; too many
human errors leading to inconsistent
structural quality (plies and varying
thicknesses); and costs that increase
along with wage rises in China. Most
of the OEMs are Chinese and prefer
to relocate to ASEAN countries like
Vietnam to take advantage of cheaper
labour rather than make any changes to
their process and industrial plant. And
yet, the aviation industry that served
as their model is once again showing
them the way, as it has been making
considerable efforts over recent years
to develop infusion and out-of-autoclave processes to increase output
without having to invest more in costly,
energy-intensive
autoclaves.
And
then there is the automotive industry:
seeking to mass-produce in series that
are more like those for sports articles, it
is investing heavily in ultra-automated,
mostly wet processes like lay-up of dry
NCF preforms, HP-RTM, compression
or resin infusion.
Net-shape carbon preforms
To keep up with the shift to more
robotized processes and the desire
of sports-article brands to minimize
logistic costs and react rapidly to market trends by bringing their production
closer to catchment areas, Chomarat
developed and patented C-PLY™, a
range of dry carbon reinforcements

jec composites magazine / N°118 January - February 2018

consisting of thin plies of fibres that
are spread and stitched along a number
of different fibre orientations. These
reinforcements now serve to fabricate
dry preforms using robots and to
create RTM-moulded parts with directfrom-mould quality. Thanks to the
powder-coated C-PLY™ reinforcements
in association with the latest advances
in robotized carbon fibre placement, it
is possible to create net-shape preforms
designed for greater drapability and
permeability, with a greater than 63%
fibre content by volume. This has also
become possible due to the progress
made with new-generation epoxy
resins and to new thermoplastic-monomer-based types of chemistry (such as
Elium by Arkema) that
are highly fluid at the
ambient injection temperature and have short
cycle times. All these
results are the fruit of
four years' participation
in the I-COMP Sport
applied research consortium.
The
consortium's
research takes place
in Singapore, in the
Institute for Sports

Windfoil
Board nose
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of JEC COMPOSITES MAGAZINE - Issue #118 - January/February 2018
