Bricks from mud and straw - a primer on composites and where to find them

than either of them individually. Typically, the primary component is the feedstock or matrix, which provides support, while the secondary component is a reinforcement, which provides strength and stiffness. Okay, so when I read this, I thought of two things, The Ten Commandments and Star Wars, you know, the movies. In the nineteen fifty six epic paroh a k a eule Brenner commands that no straw can be used to make bricks. The reply to that was, how can people

make bricks without straw? The combination of mud and straw to make bricks is actually the first known composite in Star Wars. That's obviously when Han Solo was frozen in carbonite in the Empire strikes back. Okay, well I got that one wrong. Carbonite isn't actually a composite but a flash frozen carbon gas. But it's not real either, so maybe I wasn't wrong. Um Anyway, Today we're going to talk with Dr Julia Atwood, who leads BENFS cover to

Advanced Materials. She's going to introduce us to composites, which seem to be growing in importance as they make their way into more and more areas of industry. We'll go over the uses for composites, which ones you'd use for a given job, their advantages and limitations, costs, and future demand. We'll also talk about what's next for BENF and this new research channel. Please note that BENIF does not provide investment or strategy advice, and you can hear a full

disclaimer at the end of the show. I'm Mark Taylor, out of product for BENF and you're listening to switch on the BENF Client Podcast. Hi, Julia, how you doing good? Thanks? Mark? How are you good? Good? Thanks for coming in. Can you start us off today by telling us a bit about the Advanced materials coverage? Absolutely so, advanced Materials is a new topic for BENU because we're really interested in what's going on in the world of materials. There's broadly

three things that we want to cover. The first is composites, which we're going to be talking about today. The second is cool new forms of manufacturing like three D printing or how we can make the whole indistinct greener. And then the last is around sustainable materials in the circular economy. That's driving a lot of change in materials for companies, so that's why we're really interested in it. How did

you get into this? I have been in materials for a long time, so I'm an engineer by training, but I always loved chemistry. So when I was studying engineering, I decided I wanted to specialize in materials because it gave me the best of both worlds. I could be a chemistry nerd one day and be talking to you about a turbine engine next. You're based here in London. Yes, I don't know why I asked as a question. I sit near you, m so how do you How do

you get to work? I'm really lucky. I concycle to work and I have this gorgeous along the river, so I get to kind of see the sun rising every morning over the buildings of London. Okay, that was also a loaded question. Everybody Julius cycles to work and I wanted to talk about her bike. Is your bike carbon fiber? Is it made out of carbon fiber? It is not. I'm sad to say that's the topic of today's conversation. We're gonna be talking about Compositi, as we said, and

we're gonna frame it in terms of Julia's bicycle. Would you want a carbon fiber bicycle? I absolutely would. The only reason I don't have one is because I have this emotional connection to my bike right now because I got it for fifteen pounds from one of the technicians in my old lab at university. Okay, but why would you want a carbon fiber bible? Because they're just so cool. Mark, They're cool because they have this gorgeous shape. Carbon fiber you often see as a woven material, so it's got

this beautiful like um basket weave on the materials. And the other thing is like, I'm not a big person. It's pretty hard for me to lift my massive steal commuter bicycle that I have right now. Whereas a carbon fiber frame super light. One of our colleagues, Yonus, he is very much into his bicycles, and he was telling me that the frame of his racing bike was less than a kilo and even I could lift that. Yeah, that's pretty impressive. So weight is one advantage of carbon fiber,

what's a what's another. While the other great thing about it is because it's primarily plastic, you can leave it outside and it's not going to rest. I saw a lot of bikes at university just deteriorating because they had to be left outside because none of us had garages exactly. So it's it's much more durable. So that's a big advantage if you're going through the daily wear and tear,

you're leaving your bike out in the rain. And then the other thing is that it feels much stiffer um So a lot of people don't notice because they ride the same bike all the time, but if you change too a much stiffer bike, everything just feels better. You can turn corner is more easily, it doesn't feel as wobbly. So in the in the note in the primer, you talk about weight, you talk about mechanical properties, stiffness, the durability. One thing we're not going to talk about in relation

to bicycles is the electrical and thermal properties. Could you touch on those just a little bit, Yeah, for sure. So carbon fiber is it can be a lot of things as a material. It's very easily tailored to one thing or the other, and different applications want different things. So, for example, in an aircraft, you do not want your material to be electrically conductive. So that's why carbon fiber

is great because it can be an insulator. Now in some cases if you manufacture the material in a certain way, then because carbon in the same way as graphite can use as an electrode, it can be electrically conductive. So that's That's another one of the benefits of composites is that you can kind of make them what you want by changing how you're manufacturing them. And designers love that because it means they don't have to have access material. They can just to have what they need in the

place where they need it. So it's efficient, which every engineer loves. Actually. Okay, so what would we use the term carbon fiber loosely? But but what would a carbon fiber quote unquote bicycle be made of and why composite would you choose. You would definitely choose a carbon fiber, so you could. Right now, most bicycles are made from either steel or aluminum or carbon fiber. So steel is your like retro super heavy, I don't care about weight

kind of bike. Um, it's cheap, it's cheerful, it'll do the job. Aluminum is in the seventies and eighties, when people thought they were fancy, they would get an aluminum bike. It's a bit lighter, still the same basic manufacturing techniques, so nothing big had to change for the people making it. Or you have carbon fiber, and that's very specialized, pretty expensive. You're talking about like five or six thousand dollars for a bike rather than my fifteen pounds, which is about um.

But it's much more difficult to manufacturer. You have to do it by hand. And what's in there is really interesting because there are a few different ways that you can use composites to make something. The basic constituent materials are carbon fibers, which just basically look like threads, and you can weave them. You can place them next to each other in the same way as you would deal

with like a fabric. So when you're making something with a composite, what they do is they take these fibers which are the strong bit, and then they coat them in a plastic and normally for carbon fiber that's in epoxy. And so when you combine these two, the fibers and the polymer, then you get a prepreg and then you've got like a sheet of something that you then want to place in a mold. Most of this is done

by hand and it's incredibly t idious. Basically, what you do is you put the preprag in the mold and then you get a big roller and then you roll more of the polymer resin. That's the matrix on top of it. It's like putting up wallpaper, but you have to put up layer upon layer upon layer. It's like wallpaper that you have to put up fifty times in order to get the pattern that you want. Is that why it's so expensive. Yes, that's one of the big reasons.

The other one is scale um and that's just about getting more people using carbon fibers so that we make more of it so that it gets cheaper. What are the what other limitations are there besides cost? I mean, cost is the big one because it's just such a difference. Like carbon fiber cost kilogram. Steel is like less than a dollar, and then aluminum is around two and a half dollars a kilogram. So cost is what the whole

industry is focusing on. The manufacturing is important as well, because if you have to make something by hand that's expensive, you normally make big things out of carbon fiber, so you'll make a wing for an airplane, or you'll make the body frame of a car. Because if you're going to go to the trouble of making this mold, you want to be able to use it multiple times and have it be a big proportion of what you're making. But the one of the other problems is that everybody

knows how to deal with metal. You have design standards, you know what's going to happen to it as it ages, you know how to recycle it. One of the big big problems with carbon fibers that there's not much recycling capacity. And I'm sure you've seen all this stuff around plastic waste. Nobody wants to be creating any more plastic waste these days. That's pretty bad for pr. So when you come to the industry and say I want to use this material that's made from petro chemicals and we don't recycle a

lot of it. Everyone's like, whoa hold the phone? Is this the environmentally friendly thing that we want to be doing. My answer to that is two fold. One is when you're thinking about cars and airplanes, super light high performance materials like composites, it's going to help you in the short term to reduce your emissions. And that's kind of

like a problem number one. At the end of the day, Even if you have to collect up and store all the carbon fiber waste in the world, there's not that much of it because we've only been using it in serious quantities since the eighties or nineties, and a lot of it is in things that we're still using, like airplanes. These were specialty, high performance goods that nobody wants to

throw away. You have a chart in there that shows like when carbon fibers started to appear somewhere around the eighties, and that that was mostly in airplanes. Yes, the aerospace industry has been one of the first people to adopt it, partly because you don't make that many planes a year. You know, it's a few thousand um so it's reasonable to spend a lot of money on your materials and

your manufacturing. And also because fuel is such a huge cost for them, so they can cut their costs by using this light material plant can go the same distance less fuel. You mentioned the pets are the feed stock for these carbon fibers. What about for the end composite UM But in the note you had a single few words in there they talked about bio based feed stocks.

Where is that and what might goes be? So the bio based feedstocks can be used for both the fiber and the polymer that goes in the matrix, the polymer matrix. That's a more developed area for biofeed stocks, and we're actually writing a note on that as we speak, So look out for the bioplastics word people. UM. For the fibers themselves, that's much earlier stage. It's either made from oil products to get what we call a pan fiber, or from coal to get what we call it pitch fiber.

Pitch is a little bit better. It's a slightly stronger material, so it is coming from these oil products. But at the end of the day, all you need is carbon in some form, and carbon isn't everything. So I've heard of some people trying to make carbon fibers from coconut residue. Um, but any kind of biomass could in theory be used. It's just a question of figuring out the processing route and convincing enough people to build the factories. So we've

talked about the manufacturing a little bit. We've talked about the choices you have in making a carbon fiber or an f RP is that what you call it, fiber reinforced plasta. There you go, what applications are there out there besides aerospace and what else? We say cars? So the big one that really bicycles. Naturally, the bicycles thing kind of leads into what sort of nurtured the composite industry when it first came out, and that was really

sporting goods, so like tennis, rackets, golf clubs, bicycles. So the applications you have aerospace, you have sporting goods, you have automotive. What else we have, Well, there are a bunch of companies that are trying to combine composite and three D printing because they think that what that is going to do is to allow carbon fiber to move into a bunch of sectors that it never could before.

So an example would be a robotic arm. A robotic arm has a ton of small, awkward pieces because the manufacturing is so difficult and specific for carbon fiber, you wouldn't really want a guy there trying to like lay up teeny weeny bits of carbon fiber in order to make a gear. But what you could do is three D printed. So that's how we think carbon fiber is going to move into other sectors is by improving the way it's manufactured um and by using a lot more automation.

Another one you mentioned in the in the report was wind. Can you comment a little bit on that. Yeah, so the wind industry has been a pretty big user of composites. The differences we've been talking mostly about carbon fiber composites, whereas what the wind industry uses is mostly glass fiber composites. Big difference is that it's much cheaper, So carbon i was like twenty, glass fibers like four. It's still pretty light, it's just not quite as strong and not quite as stiff.

But it's been serving the wind industry pretty well, and even as their blades have been getting longer, and longer and longer. The glass fiber manufacturers have just been adapting and they've been using all of these sort of properties that you can change by changing the direction of the

fibers to make it work. So people have been talking about when is the industry you're going to move to carbon fiber for a long time and the answer is they only will once the glass fiber people put their hands up and say, this is a limit of what we can do. This is kind of the fundamental end of the road. Can't squeeze anymore from this material. And if I were the glass industry, I would say never. I would never say that. Yeah, and that's what they

do say. So what they've started to say now is Okay, maybe you need carbon fiber at this one bit close to the base of the wind turbine where it's going to connect. Um, Yeah, where the blade connects to the hub. But most of it you're good with glass fiber. And was a similar thing, you know, when when they were moving from say wood to glass fiber. It was like replace things iteratively. That happens so much in materials. I

always talk about materials. It's like the performance enhancement of last resort because it means you have to change your supplier, you have to change your manufacturing technique. But what it gives you is a step change in performance, and that's why people change that or sustainability. Yeah, the landscape, though you mentioned you kind of alluded to it. You have to change your supplier, you have to change your whole way of doing things. I think we might have saved

this for another day. But the supply chain for carbon fiber can't be that deep, can it. It's very much consolidated, so the biggest producers of carbon fiber are really a few Japanese is in US companies. The interesting thing is that China has actually designated carbon fiber is a strategic industry. So while most of the oh I think it was in there made plans, so it was a few years ago and that's really when we started to see a jump in capacity from the Chinese manufacturers. So they have

big ambitions. Even though most carbon fiber is now made in either Japan or the US, if China meets the kind of targets that they have for installing new capacity, they'll leap frog the Japanese suppliers. That would be huge for the market. So right now capacity is about a hundred and fifty thousand metric tons per year, and China wants to install like one Chinese company wants to install sixty thousand metric tons of capacity, so big, big things

could happen in carbon fiber. Yeah, two more questions. One, let's say I'm a benof client. What is the one thing that you want me to take away from this report? What I want you to take away is carbon fiber is the material of the future, and it's getting better in every way. The material of the future or a materially a material of the future. Then okay, because we can't make computer chips out of it. But yeah, it's like in every way I see in my job how

it's getting better. Manufacturing is getting better. People are starting to recycle it in large quantities. Costs are coming down. As soon as cost comes down the rest of it, it's like a no brainer, right, And the cost will come down from more and more companies like this one in China building more of it or doing more of it exactly. And as much as you can standardize parts, that helps a lot. That's what the aerospace industry did.

They said, we want this tube of this dimension make a lot of them for us, and they were able to bring costs down to like ten dollars a kill gram. So it's hugely important to standardize and make lots. Very cool, very cool. Final question, what's next in this, uh this research pipeline. So what we're going to be writing on next is around company and country strategy. We're going to write a note on China's plans for the composites industry,

and we're going to release some company profiles. To your question about the supply chain, we're going to show where all the manufacturing capacity is, who's making it, and what they're going to do next. Excellent. Thanks for joining us, Julia, thanks for having me, and thanks everybody for listening. To switch on. Bloomberguin ea F is a service provided by

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