The International Conference on Composite Materials – And What’s Coming Soon

#composites, #sustainability, #energyefficiency, #renewableenergy, #fibers, #resins

I gave my paper at the International Conference on Composite Materials (ICCM) last Friday (Aug 8) to what was a very receptive audience.  There were probably 30 people in the room, and I got some good questions.  The one I liked the best was “How do you dispel the myth that carbon fiber doesn’t have a high carbon footprint”.  The question is based on this narrative that you take the oil up out of the ground, turn it into carbon fiber, and then that carbon is sequestered in a material that will last 1000 years.  Of course that one was easy to answer for me because I have written about that very subject many times.

It of course starts with the fact that acrylonitrile and epichlorohydrin, the two organics that make up the polyacrylonitrile (PAN) that are then turned into carbon fiber come entirely from petroleum sources.  So, the cradle to grave story goes something like this:  First you have to get the petroleum up out of the ground, and drilling rigs of today run on diesel fuel.  Next you have to refine the petroleum, and that causes you to lose about 20% of the carbon you just got out of the ground.  Then you have to process the petroleum that you have refined into acrylonitrile and epichlorohydrin, both of which are energy intensive processes and again either burn oil or natural gas for process heat.  Then you have to polymerize the acrylonitrile with some epichlorohydrin to get PAN, again using mostly natural gas for process heat.  Then you have to cook the PAN fibers in an oxygen deprived atmosphere at very high temperatures to drive off everything that isn’t carbon.  This last step most commonly uses heavy heating oil to get to the temperatures needed to make the carbon fiber.  So, of all of the carbon that was taken up out of the ground in the form of crude oil, about 5% of it ends up in the carbon fiber and 95% (or so) of it goes into the atmosphere.  That is a pretty carbon intensive process in my mind.  And at least I was able to say that part out loud at the conference. 

ICCM was actually a really good conference and rather well attended compared to some of the earlier years.  I gave a talk at one almost 35 years ago (1991 I believe).  That paper is in the proceedings of that conference.  Great big book with dark blue bindings that sits on my bookshelf at home.  That conference wasn’t at a venue as large as the Baltimore Convention Center, and it was not as well attended as later conferences have been.  This year, however, the conference was pretty well attended and had quite the sustainability track running through it.  My paper and talk was just one of a number of papers that were given on the subject.  I of course provided my roadmap for the industry that I have been talking about for a couple of years at this point, but my overall take from the conference, from the session where I gave my paper, and the one right after it where I was session chair, was that the industry as well as academia is actually quite focused on the problem of sustainability of composite materials. 

Everyone that I met at the conference and all of the papers and keynote presentations that dealt with sustainability were working on one piece or another of the puzzle and trying to scale up their demonstrated processes.  There was a lot of talk about sustainable resin development, plant-based acrylonitrile, natural fibers, means of detaching the resin from the fiber when the composite part comes to the end of its useful life, and reclaiming all of that and shoving it all back into the front end of the process to make new parts.  I was even able to make a few connections between folks and give some of the people that didn’t know where to take their stuff some ideas about where they might be able to form partnerships.  All in all a good conference and some pretty cool stuff. 

The graphic at the start of this post is one from the paper I put in the proceedings of this year’s conference.  Sustainability in the industry is after all about turning the industry from a linear (oil well to landfill) to a circular industry.  It was apparent that this theme was actually woven throughout the conference, which gave me great hope for this industry.  What I witnessed at this conference and also the SAMPE conference last year (2024) was the beginnings of a transformation of the industry much along the lines of what I have been preaching for the last couple of years.  And the picture that says it all of course is this huge pile of used wind turbine blades stacked up in Sweetwater Texas.

As I look through the proceedings of ICCM this year, there are papers about sustainability in the aircraft industry; energy efficiency using UV light generated by renewable electricity for liquid resin curing; the construction industry where sustainable materials have become a real focus; natural fiber composites for the marine industry (which I have written about in the past); sustainable multifunction materials for batteries; thermoplastic composites for the upcoming hydrogen economy; development of high performance biomass-based composites using some organic chemistry from plants as well as lignin that rivals the performance of PEEK thermoplastic composites; reprocessing of trim waste from composite fabrication (as in the Hexcel/Fairmat partnership that I have written about); and a whole host of other topics too numerous to name here.

The bottom line to all of this is that it appears to me that the industry as well as academia and some research and development organizations as well as the research arms of the material manufacturers are very serious about sustainability of these materials.  The industry as well as academics in universities here as well as in Europe and Asia have come to the realization that the industry needs to transform itself from where we are today to a truly sustainable future.  The industry is actually maturing since what was only a decade or so ago from its niche, expensive, high performance, high cost, specialty industry into what is now more of a mature commodity industry.  A good bit of this maturation has come from the renewable energy industry in the form of wind turbines and their blades.  But seeing companies like BMW, VW, and Ford and their researchers giving talks at this conference about their efforts in not only the application of composites but also the sustainability of their products was quite noticeable and struck a very positive tone for the future of this business. 

There are a couple of people who gave talks at the session that I chaired that I have asked to provide me with some more information about their research results and promised to focus at least one of my posts on their topic.  One of these was a paper from a researcher at the National Composites Center in the UK that has come up with a way to take recycled carbon fiber and return it to its near virgin continuous form and reuse it to make a hydrogen pressure vessel.  These folks are looking for partners to join them and commercialize their research results.  So, you will hear about them soon. 

So, for those of you interested in getting into this business, what’s coming soon is a very focused effort on the parts of most of the companies in this industry on doing their part to turn the composites industry from a linear business into a circular business.  Ned’s advice – find a good niche in this space that fascinates you and go for it.  Even if the economy sours a bit over the next few years, these sustainability efforts by the auto companies, infrastructure, sports equipment manufacturing, and even consumer goods manufacturing will not be going away.  Neither will the R&D efforts that will lead us down the right paths so that the R&D results can be commercialized.  And the industry needs more smart and energetic engineers and scientists to forge the path forward. 

OK – I’m off my soap box so 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.  And that is especially true of the companies and research institutions that I mention in these posts.  The more we communicate the message the better we will be able to effect the changes in the industry that are needed. 

My second book, which may be out in the late fall (fingers crossed), 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.  As I have said before, my publisher and my daughter have come to an agreement about the cover.  So, I’ve included the approved cover at the end of this post.  Let me know whether or not you like the cover.  Hopefully people will like it enough and will be interested enough in composites sustainability that they will buy it.  And of course I hope that they read it and get engaged.  We need all the help we can get. 

Last but not least, I still need to plug my first book.  “The String and Glue of our World” 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 August of 2023 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 are pictures of the covers of both books.