First I want to wish everyone a great holiday. Hopefully you get some time to spend with family and friends and eat, drink, and be merry. Connecting up with loved ones around the holidays is always good food for the soul.
I saw a cool picture in the BBC news feed (below) that doesn’t have a lot to do with the subject I’m going to be talking about, but it did get me thinking about composites, water sports, how much recyclable and recycled and bio-based materials are going into new water sports equipment. And I also wanted to add a couple more yacht manufacturers that I didn’t have room for in last week’s post. And – just so that everyone knows, this is my last post for the year, and I am going to take next week off, so the next one will be in the second week in January. And since this is my last post of the year I thought I would have some fun with this one.
But first the pic from the BBC. Those of you on LinkedIn will see this first, so maybe you want to read it from my website instead.
Now that guy’s getting some air – and showing off!! He is of course a champion surfer, and he is in Tahiti of all places, but I thought this pic was a great way to end the year.
And that also got me to thinking a bit more about water sports and the equipment in water sports that is made using composites. Just exactly how much bio-based or recycled or recyclable material goes into making all of the water toys that we enjoy that are made using composites. The story as you may be able to tell from where I’m going here, is actually pretty good.
There is a recent article in Composites World about a surfboard manufacturer in France, Notox Surfboards, that is in the business of making sustainable high end (big wave) surfboards. This company is making custom built boards for the Nazare Big Waves Challenge in Portugal, and they are using a whole host of sustainable, recycled, recyclable, and bio-based materials in a custom made board for Clement Roseyro (champion big wave surfer).
Notox made this board using flax fabric from Libeco for the surfaces and to control vibration and to damp out the high frequency vibrations at high speeds, recycled carbon fiber fabric from Airbus for the structural parts of the surfboard, GreenPoxy bioresin from Sicomin, and an agave core material for light weight and durability of the board. None of the materials that went into this champion big wave surfboard came from petroleum feedstocks.
While the surfer getting air and showing off in the first pic here is not the same guy or the same board as the Notox board above, they very well could be. And since I did something of a search for more companies that are doing much the same thing, I of course came across a few, some that are new names and some that I have mentioned before in this newsletter that actually recycle carbon fiber and make new products out of it.
Down Under a startup spun out of Australia’s Deakin University, JUC Surf, worked with Boeing R&T Aerospace in Australia to develop better methods for recycling the carbon fiber from fabric and prepreg cutoffs from Boeing’s manufacturing process that maintain more of the mechanical properties of the carbon fiber, and also worked on fiber surface treatments to enhance adhesion of the resins, and developed a surfboard line for the high end Australian surfing community. As some of you know, Australia has some of the biggest and most challenging waves on the planet, and since Aussies are either fearless or crazy depending on how you look at it, there are lots of champion surfers on that continent.
Apparently also since they were using scrap carbon fiber as their structural material rather than virgin fiberglass, not only are these boards stronger and lighter weight, but the cost difference is miniscule. Reusing expensive carbon fiber that would otherwise be buried in a landfill has some enormous cost benefits for an application like this.
This board looks a lot like the board in the first pic here where the surfer got some air, and it could very well be made by the same company in Australia. It doesn’t look to me like he’s going to have a very good time today though, the water is pretty flat.
Another organization that is headquartered near Bangkok Thailand, Starboard Blue, is recycling carbon fiber from broken IQ Foil windsurfing masts into fins for stand-up paddleboards. The IQ foil is a competition windsurfing class windsurf board that replaced the RS:X class for the 2024 Summer Olympic games. As you may imagine, there were a lot of broken masts from that competition alone, and normally they would have been landfilled. Starboard Blue is an environmental action agency that is actively working on sustainability and has taken it upon themselves to dig in pretty deeply into the creation of a circular economy for carbon fiber. It is only fitting that the broken masts be turned into fins for both the IQ foil and for other standup paddleboards.
This pic is what Starboard Blue calls their “Flash” fin and it is intended to be a direct replacement for a standard SUP fin. Starboard Blue worked with the Carbon Fibre Circular Alliance and Lineat Composites to produce their Flash Fin. The Carbon Fibre Circular Alliance is part of the World Sailing Trust, an international charitable organization focused on supporting sailing all over the world. Headquartered in the UK, this is the global governing body for the sport of sailing. As such they have a mission to protect the waters and the environment for future generations of sailors. They are therefore quite interested in sustainability, which includes composites. They are the ones that had all of the broken IQ foil wind surfing masts from all of the competition leading up to and at the Summer Olympics.
Lineat Composites started out of the Bristol Composites Institute at the University of Bristol, UK. They have developed a product that they call their Aligned Formable Fibre Technology (AFFT™) which is a unidirectional tape made using recycled carbon fiber and a thermoplastic resin to make these tapes. And it is this AFFT™ tape that the Flash fin is made with, so this is a completely recycled and recyclable carbon fiber SUP fin.
So now I want to get back to recycled carbon fiber being used on sailboats, mostly racing sailboats because these boats need to be as light and strong as the designers and builders can make them or they don’t win races.
To that end, there is a French designer and builder of ocean racing boats, MerConcept, that has recently announced a partnership with another French company, Exthracthive, to use Exthracthive’s recycled carbon fibers in all sorts of structures for their boats.
This is one example of the partnership between these two companies. It is a ballast dorade vent – the vent that sits up above the deck that provides air to the interior of the ballast tanks that are used on each side of the boat to help balance the boat when it is heeled over on a broad reach (those of you that don’t know what this means, please let me know and I will explain it to you) or beating to windward. The curved part is the front of the vent so that when a wave crashes over the bow of the boat it doesn’t swamp the boat, but it does let air circulate below the deck. And since it is above the center of buoyancy of the boat, it is made from the lightest weight, strongest material we know – carbon fiber. This one just happens to be recycled carbon fiber recovered using Exthracthive’s process.
There is just one more company that I found that I need to mention here. ECO yachts in Monfalcone Italy has launched a 30 foot long racing sailboat that they call the ecoracer30.
This sailboat hull is made using a thermoplastic matrix material and recycled carbon and glass fibers. The Italian company that spun off ECO Yachts, NLcomp®, initially made a 27 foot prototype of this boat using their thermoplastic infusion process. They lay up a fiber mat of flax and recycled carbon fibers over a recycled foam core and infuse the fiber mat with PMMA thermoplastic. Then they add a gel coat and they have a complete sailboat hull that can be recycled easily by just melting out the PMMA and recovering all of the fiber and the foam. In addition to a recycled and recyclable hull, ECO Yachts has also incorporated solar and wind power technologies and also use 4T FORTE™ recyclable sails by One Sail. So this boat is a good example of a manufacturable, completely sustainable, and carbon neutral sailing yacht.
That’s about it for this week. I hope everyone that reads these posts enjoys them as much as I enjoy writing them. And as some of you already know, since I love having the wind push me around on the water, this one as well as last week’s post were especially fun for me.
As usual I will post this first on my website – www.nedpatton.com – and then on LinkedIn. And if anyone wants to provide comments to this, I welcome them with open arms. Comments, criticisms, etc. are all quite welcome. I really do want to engage in a conversation with all of you about composites because we can learn so much from each other as long as we share our own perspectives.
For my upcoming book, I got all of the image permissions I needed and this thing is in the hands of McFarland Books. I have talked about this one now for a month or two to let everyone know that it is about what I have been writing in these newsletters for the last 6 months or so – sustainability of composites and a path to the future that does not include using fossil fuels for either the raw materials or the process energy to make composites. So, since I got this thing to my publisher about a month earlier than I had expected, maybe it will make it out by July of next year? I’ll keep everyone posted.
Finally, I still need to plug my first book, so here’s the plug. The book pretty much covers the watershed in composites, starting with a brief history of composites, then introducing the Periodic Table and why Carbon is such an important and interesting element. The book was published and made available last August and is available both on Amazon and from McFarland Books – my publisher. However, the best place to get one is to go to my website and buy one. I will send you a signed copy for the same price you would get charged on Amazon, except that I charge $8 shipping. Anyway, here’s the link to get your signed copy: https://www.nedpatton.com/product-page/the-string-and-glue-of-our-world-signed-copy. And as usual, here’s a picture of the book.
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