February 2016

The cover story of Composite World magazine’s current issue features Cevotec’s Fiber Patch Placement technology and it’s advantages for manufacturers to tailor anisotropic laminates to achieve specific lightweight objectives. The Fiber Patch Placement technology enables a laminate design where carbon fibers are ideally oriented along load paths and are placed only where needed, leading to highly efficient composite products. North Kiteboarding, the global market leader for kiteboards and sails, works together with Cevotec to tailor the properties of their top line kiteboards with curved, unidirectional fiber patch laminates.

“Our testing showed exactly what we thought the Cevotec patches would do for us,” says North Kiteboarding Product Manager Dirk Hanel. “We can iterate the patches in a design to tweak performance very quickly,” Hanel explains, “and keep iterating to get just what we need without having to redesign the whole board from scratch. You could never do this with the old materials.”

Cevotec excels in the manufacture of parts with complex loads and/or geometry. Cevotec’s technology “can break down this complexity into unidirectional patches that align the reinforcement precisely to the load path,” explains Cevotec’s Head of Technology Felix Michl. “This simplifies the layup process and also enables automated manufacturing.” The article explains one way to use Cevotec’s technology by using the advantages of high complexity components and the efficient way of placing them into the customer’s product.

Read the whole article in the “Related Links” below and learn how North Kiteboarding gains a competitive edge using Cevotec’s Fiber Patch Placement technology.