Advanced Manufacturing Needs for Carbon Fiber

Carbon fiber composites are advanced materials well known for high strength, high stiffness, and lightweight structures. One of the barriers to implementation of carbon fiber composites has been cost.  As affordability of structures increases in importance, further emphasis will be placed on advanced manufacturing methods that satisfy product-life-cycle cost reductions. The use of carbon fiber for aerospace structures is surging, especially with commercial aerospace applications. Global capa-city is rapidly increasing, and the industry is looking for development opportunities that continue the growth of applications. This pre-sentation will describe the unique needs of aerospace manufacturing that will drive the product development of future generations of carbon fiber. A version of this presentation will also be delivered in December at Composites World 2011 Carbon Fiber.

Speaker: Dr. Slade Gardner is a Lockheed Martin Fellow at the Advanced Technology Center. He is a corporate subject matter expert on polymers, composites, nanomaterials and advanced manufacturing methods. Dr. Gardner's experience with composite and tooling development includes an RTM JSF vertical tail demo article, Orion composite fairing development, FDM polymer tooling for F-35 composites, and R&D of advanced manufacturing concepts for thermoplastic composites. Prior to Lockheed Martin, Slade worked for Amoco Carbon Fibers at the Global R&D Center doing new product development and plant support technologies.