Exploring the applications for carbon composites
Hello everyone, I am Christophe Lanaud and I work at the GE Global Research facility in Munich, Germany. I manage the Composites Manufacturing Laboratory, which focuses on composite materials and processes as well as machine, control and robotic systems. This week we held a composites symposium, which hosted multiple industries from Europe, European Universities, and GE businesses. The symposium helped to give the perspective and use of composite material for various applications like automotive, aerospace and energy with a focus on manufacturing. The symposium was organized in collaboration with the University of Munich, specifically, the Carbon Composites Center of Excellence.
It was the first time that GE Global Research organized a symposium on composites and I am proud to say it was a very big success with more than 140 participants. We started the symposium with a keynote followed by presentations covering the automotive, aerospace and energy sector. We then had a panel discussion on the challenges of high volume production followed by a presentation of GE global research and the composite material activities.
Scott Finn our chief engineer was the keynote speaker. Scott delivered a great speech covering the carbon fiber composite with a multi industry perspective. His presentation made clear that affordability was essential to see high penetration of carbon fiber composite in industrial application.
We continued the symposium with speakers from EADS, BMW and GE Energy, covering the aerospace, automotive and energy sector. Some of the reoccurring themes that came up in the presentations were that the volume of carbon fiber composite structure is increasing, the cost of carbon fiber is high, and the manufacturing process is laborious. Those are topics actively worked on at GE Global Research, which put us at the forefront of the challenges to solve.
We had a lively panel discussion with the presenters, which I facilitated with questions around high volume production. Although a lot of challenges have to be solved in order to respond to the demand, none of the panel members seemed to be afraid of high volume production. This was very good to hear from representatives of the automotive, aerospace and energy sector!
During the following day, we had presentations clustered in three categories: manufacturing technologies, materials and additives and design and simulation. We heard remarks looking at the market from different perspective and it was clear that design, materials and manufacturing have to work together in order to make carbon fiber composite structure economically viable solution in our near future. At the end of the symposium, Carlos Haertel, the GE Global Research Europe managing director as well as Klaus Drechsler, the head of the TUM Carbon Composite Center of Excellence closed the event with an excellent wrap up of the one-day and half event.
The mood throughout the symposium was great and the evening and mealtime discussions were lively with many players from the industry exchanging ideas and different points of view. We believe the event provided a great opportunity to meet and discuss ideas with key industry members and we are looking forward to holding a similar event next year.
GE Global Research, a place where new ideas are born!