Sustainability – A Look at Energy Efficiency in Composites Manufacturing

#composites, #sustainability, #energyefficiency, #renewableenergy, #fibermanufacture, #resinmanufacture

This week I thought I would touch on a subject that I have talked about for some time, but that I have not dwelled on enough.  And it is arguably the simplest of all of the potential avenues for the industry to enhance their sustainability in a meaningful way without too much disruption to their business.  What I’m talking about is taking a long look at current processes in manufacturing and fabrication of composites to see where there can be energy savings or significant improvements in processes to make them more energy efficient and lower their carbon footprint.  While I have talked about different means to manufacture carbon fiber than oil or gas fired furnaces, and about obtaining process energy from renewable sources for fiber manufacture, resin manufacture, and even curing of composite parts; there is more that can be done and more that the industry is doing in this regard than one might imagine.  And it involves renewable energy, inherently recyclable materials, and renewable processes as well. 

I thought this was a nice pic to get everyone started thinking about renewables, or just to admire the view.  This one feeds two of my passions – the ocean and wind turbines.  Let me know what you all think.  There could be a big, pretty sailboat going past to make this scene more bucolic, but the seagulls are enough for me for now.  At least this pic makes a point that I am trying to get across.  Renewable energy is our future. 

In any case, as I started digging into this subject what I found was that the entire composites industry is already not only looking at ways to improve their energy efficiency performance, nearly all of the companies involved in composites are actually doing something about it. 

A good example of a company dedicating resources to efficiency and sustainability is Airbus, one of the more important and larger volume users of advanced composites in the industry.  As a company, they have dedicated themselves to becoming sustainable and carbon neutral by 2050 and have flowed these requirements down to all of their suppliers.  Case in point, in an article in Composites World from March 25 of this year (https://www.compositesworld.com/articles/measuring-energy-use-to-enable-sustainable-composites-production), a wholly owned subsidiary of Airbus, CTC, has adopted a suite of new technologies to measure and improve on their energy efficiency.  What they do is to take enough data both from their processes and from the processes of their raw material suppliers to enable the calculation and reporting of the full life cycle of the parts that they make for Airbus.  This Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) is then reported to Airbus in a way that Airbus can incorporate their info into the overall LCA for every aircraft or other vehicle that they manufacture and sell on the open market.  It is the goal of Airbus to improve their LCA over time to the point that they can become carbon neutral in about 2 ½ decades time.  It is probably going to take that long, and it is going to be a challenging road, but this is a good start.

This is just one example of many, and the motivation for this is that the customers of these composites manufacturers are demanding full life cycle analyses for the systems and vehicles that they purchase and use.  This is true of not only the airlines and air cargo companies that buy Airbus and Boeing products (Boeing is doing the same thing by the way), it is also true of the automotive industry, sporting goods, wind energy, and most consumer goods that are produced and sold on the open market. 

There is also a good review paper published in an Elsevier journal at the beginning of February this year that talks about how composites fabricators can and are retooling their fabrication processes to use electricity for process energy to consolidate and cure resin systems (“A review on energy-efficient manufacturing for high-performance fibre-reinforced composites”, Composites: Part A 192 (2025) 108779, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compositesa.2025.108779).  This paper has a rather interesting graphic that demonstrates how electrical power can be used to cure nearly all resin systems and also consolidate nearly all thermoplastic composite parts. 

This is interesting in that it covers nearly any scenario where you need to either cure a resin system or consolidate a thermoplastic composite part.  Note that they cover not only electrical current, but also most available wavelength bands that are used industrially right now for processing all sorts of plastics, adhesives, and a whole host of other things.  And they even include the exotherm from a curing resin like epoxy or polyester. 

Moving on here, one very telling piece of evidence that the industry is adopting this new mindset of efficiency in all of their operations is that the world’s largest conference and exhibit this year, JEC World in Paris, focused nearly half of its presentations and exhibits on sustainability and efforts ongoing in the industry as a whole to improve manufacturing efficiency, use renewable energy wherever possible, find new ways to provide process heat than oil or gas furnaces, use of bio-based precursors that do not require as much energy to produce and are carbon neutral, and the list goes on.  JEC World also walked the walk in this regard with their conference in Paris deliberately showcasing efforts in sustainable energy and material use, using LED lighting everywhere, lowering and optimizing thermostats, only having electricity turned on during the show and shutting down all of their electrical boxes in the evenings and overnight.  They also ensured that all materials at the conference were either reused or recycled, making sure that all exhibitors used only reusable or recyclable materials, and did not provide any single use plastics (plates, cups, forks knives, spoons, etc.) to the attendees for food or drinks.  All of the food vendors used recyclable or compostable packaging and table ware. 

One article directly from JEC Group (https://www.jeccomposites.com/news/spotted-by-jec/need-for-energy-efficient-structures-calls-for-more-durable-composite-structures/?news_type=announcement,business&end_use_application=aerospace,automotive-road-transportation,renewable-energy) talks about how energy efficient structures are actually demanding the use of more durable materials, which of course means composites.  What they are talking about in this article is the launch of an EU funded project called D-STANDART which is aimed at developing efficient methods to model and improve the durability of large scale composite structures.  This of course includes the big three:  wind turbine blades, aerospace, and automotive.  There is some additional work ongoing in the construction industry as well, but D-STANDART is really focusing on enhancing the durability of the large structures that are the most prevalent and becoming mainstream.  As in, the longer a wind turbine blade lasts, or an aircraft is certified to fly, or your automobile or pickup hangs together without needing to be replaced or repaired, the more energy is saved because you don’t have to make a new one.  While D-STANDART is focusing on durability of these large structures, what is actually saved is not only the carbon footprint of making new structures when the old ones wear out prematurely, it is also saving all of the energy that goes into making the parts in the first place. 

Another example, again from the EU, is a new European Circular Composites Alliance between the European Composites Industry Association (EuCIA) and JEC Group.  This alliance is intended to establish the groundwork for a completely circular composites industry in Europe.  What the EU and the European Commission have realized, and are putting into practice, is that circularity in the composites industry will lead not only to sustainability in composites, but also to growth in the industry, and more profitability in the companies that adopt a circular ecosystem for all of their products.  They see lowering their carbon footprint, improving energy efficiency in all of the processes that the industry uses, reducing waste, using renewables whenever possible, and enabling energy efficient recycling of advanced composites will lead to growth in the industry.  As these technologies scale up what gets saved is cost to manufacture.  The less of all of the expensive things you use to make something, the lower your costs are to manufacture which leads to a lower price for your product at the same margin.  This leads to getting the same profit margins at more competitive prices, so you can compete on price as well as quality.  This is especially true of energy costs, which are rather high in the composites manufacturing business.  Moving away from petroleum based process energy toward electricity, especially when it can come from renewable sources, will over the long haul reduce their costs substantially.  In fact, when the ROI is calculated for a change from, for example, oil fired furnaces to make carbon fiber to microwave heating to make carbon fiber, the capital expense of the change over to microwave heating can be amortized in a very short span of years.  And after those costs are amortized this change in process will provide a net reduction in the cost of making carbon fiber, so those companies that adopt this will be able to sell their fiber at a lower cost than competitors that don’t.  The economics of this is pretty simple.  Make your processes more efficient and reap the rewards in profitability for your company. 

If you don’t think that the major carbon fiber manufacturers (Toray, Teijin, Hexcel, Solvay Group, etc.) aren’t thinking along these lines, think again.  It is apparent to me that the industry has woken up to this in a substantial way, and all of the big players are advertising their own internal investments in not only materials improvements, but energy efficiency improvements, more efficient and less labor intensive manufacturing, more efficient production, and lowering all of the costs that they can throughout their entire value chain.

Another part of the industry that is also focusing as much as possible on the energy and process efficiency of their piece of the puzzle is the burgeoning composites recycling industry.  I have it on good authority that companies that are pioneering this part of the industry, like Composite Recycling, have developed their processes in such a way that they can take process energy from nearly any source.  This means that when someone finally starts working on the piles of used wind turbine blades in the fields outside of Sweetwater Texas, they will be able to use the electricity from the local wind turbine farms to enable the recycling of the used blades.  This seems so obvious to me that I would be somewhat surprised if that wasn’t part of the discussion ongoing now about how to get rid of those blades in a responsible manner.  That is of course once the lawsuits have been settled and the actual problem gets tackled. 

Finally, not to be left out of this discussion, here in the US, the Institute for Advanced Composites Manufacturing Innovation (IACMI), which I have talked about in the past, is showcasing a new Innovation South facility at the University of Tennessee’s Research Park at Cherokee Farm near Knoxville.  They have brought together the University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Lab to build and begin to operate this state of the art facility on the U of Tennessee campus to enable both startup companies to hone their processes and to train the workforce of the future for the composites industry in the deep South of the US. 

Both the University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory have been and will continue to be leaders in the development of newer and more sustainable composite materials and the means of manufacturing them.  I have talked in the past about the ORNL PECAN resin system which is entirely plant-based, as well as their plant-based carbon fiber and how they used both to make a prototype wind turbine blade.  This new center will enhance their ability to remain in a leadership position in this area for a long time to come.  And it will bring economic prosperity to an area of the country where things like this are sorely lacking.  This facility is also being backed up by major players in the industry, some of whom have joined up with IACMI to co-locate parts of their commercial R&D facilities with this new Innovation Center.  These companies see this as a means to not only advance their own efforts in sustainability, but also to give them ready access to trained personnel to work in their organizations and become the future of their businesses. 

All in all, these are good signs that the industry both in Europe and here in the US are paying attention to the efficiency of their manufacturing operations and making real investments in reducing the carbon footprint of the industry by at first improving efficiency of all industrial processes and using renewables for process energy as much as possible.  Being carbon neutral by 2050 will not be achieved without these ongoing efforts being successful.  The future of this industry is at stake in achieving successful results in these efforts. 

That’s about it for this week.  As always, I hope everyone that reads these posts enjoys them as much as I enjoy writing them.  I will post this first on my website – www.nedpatton.com –and then on LinkedIn.  And if anyone wants to provide comments to this, I welcome them with open arms.  Comments, criticisms, etc. are all quite welcome.  I really do want to engage in a conversation with all of you about composites because we can learn so much from each other as long as we share our own perspectives. 

My publisher and I are still discussing the title of my next book.  Their latest is, “Making Composite Materials Sustainable: The Challenge of Closing the Circle”.  I’m not convinced that this is the right title for the book.  For one thing it is too long and not catchy like “Close the Circle” is.  And it does not convey the idea that the book is a guide for people in the industry to transform their business into a sustainable, circular business model.  I’d like to know from you what you think.  The book truly is a roadmap to a circular and sustainable business model for the industry which I hope that at least at some level the industry will follow.  Only time will tell.  And of course as soon as we finally agree on a title and our daughter gets done with the cover art, I will be putting that graphic at the bottom of these posts.  So stay tuned and you will see how it is going to look.  Hopefully people will like it enough that they will buy it.  And of course my ultimate hope is that they read it and get engaged.  We need all the help we can get. 

Finally, I still need to plug my first book, so here’s the plug.  The book pretty much covers the watershed in composites, starting with a brief history of composites, then introducing the Periodic Table and why Carbon is such an important and interesting element.  The book was published and made available last August and is available both on Amazon and from McFarland Books – my publisher.  However, the best place to get one is to go to my website and buy one.  I will send you a signed copy for the same price you would get charged on Amazon for an unsigned one, except that I have to charge for shipping.  Anyway, here’s the link to get your signed copy:  https://www.nedpatton.com/product-page/the-string-and-glue-of-our-world-signed-copy.  And as usual, here’s a picture of the book.