march 2010 . More productivity for composites

"In the past years, composite materials have experienced a great evolution that has lead them to spread to several application departments, first of all in ship building and automotive- says Marcello Persico, Managing Director for Persico Marine Division. Starting from the know-how, gained in over 35 years of activity of our Automotive,  Rotomolding, Marine and Engineering divisions;  in our in-house research and development department we have developed innovative technologies, aimed at increasing productivity of parts in composite material. For instance, we have patented an aluminium mould for the construction of masts in carbon. The mould is made of two halves and includes an oil heating and cooling circuit: thermal control has always been one of our strengths. To develop this process we initiated a collaboration with SP (Gurit’s nautical division) that has supplied us with a special composite material based on carbon fibre. Once the carbon had been laminated inside the mould, the mould is then closed, heated and brought to pressure with the presence of a pressure bag inside it. At the end of the cycle, the piece is extracted and it features great dimensional accuracy and a perfect surface finish. The great advantage of this procedure is that it allows us to position all the carbon layers simultaneously together increasing productivity and saving time, as with conventional methods this is very time consuming. Consequently, there is a single compaction process, a single heating process and in only two days it is possible to obtain a finished mast without using autoclave. For our first experiment, we constructed a mast that has been  judged by an expert of the America’s Cup, so that he could evaluate the results: he confirmed with NDT (non destructive testing) the perfect compaction of the material. At this point we have manufactured a mast for a Mumm 30: even in terms of coupling accuracy and functionality this is comparable to other ‘traditional’ masts."