Continuous Fiber Composites
ES3’s work is focused in the environmentally responsible development of recyclable continuous fiber composite material. Composite structures (such as wind turbine blades) are too often only disposable through underground burial. This very undesirable end-of-life requirement can and should be avoided. Hence, ES3 prioritizes development and usage of highly recyclable thermoplastic based composite materials
ES3 SCRAM can produce complex 3 dimensional fully consolidated thermoplastic composite parts all on one machine.
ES3 has several continuous fiber composite development and production machines. Our largest and most advanced is the Electroimpact SCRAM. The SCRAM is a 6-axis machine which enables our material designers to engineer composites where the fiber orientation can be specified at every point in the part’s geometry. In this way, ES3 can optimize part performance by tailoring strength and flexibility where needed. ES3 is developing aerospace replacement parts with unprecedented strength-to-weight ratios.
The 6-axis Electroimpact SCRAM machine located at the ES3 facility in Clearfield, Utah.
Four different closeup views of the SCRAM AM head fabricating an ES3 engineered specimen for test.
The SCRAM Robots core capabilities revolve around a laser assisted, in-situ consolidation process. Structures coming out of the SCRAM work cell are fully cured and ready for service use, bypassing the extensive time and cost penalties associated with traditional composite autoclave processing. With the SCRAM Robots pellet extrusion processing head, complex and bespoke layup tooling can be created on-demand to facilitate fabrication of complex composite structures. ES3 is pioneering the usage of environmentally friendly, water dissolvable material for use as compaction tooling, this allows for fabrication of composite parts with constraining interior geometries not currently possible with traditional composite hard tools. ES3’s composite fabrication expertise allows production of complex geometries, variable density cores, topology optimized load bearing structures, and outer layer finish skins.
ES3 AM continuous fiber composite material development and production is vastly facilitated by our ability to computationally predict the performance of our composite designs. Our in-house developed MARS solver with its DM4C material modeling technique enables our engineers to iterate rapidly and cost effectively between material design and computational simulation. We do not rely on the time consuming and more costly trial-and-error loop of building then testing. As such, ES3 is able to engineer custom structural components quickly and economically, delivering us to the test and qualification phase of aerospace parts development in record time. Please visit the MARS Solver – Aerospace Applications section of our website for more information.