STEVE MEAD, CHIEF COMMERCIAL OFFICER, TENCATE ADVANCED COMPOSITES

In a personal address, Steve Mead, Chief Commercial Officer at TenCate Advanced Composites, introduces the company as part of the Toray family.

“I am honored to have the opportunity to share TenCate’s “look to the future” with you, as we are now part of the Toray family. In 2015, TenCate Advanced Composites, a part of 300+ year Dutch textiles company Royal TenCate, was acquired by a consortium of private equity investors led by Gilde, a leading mid-market private equity firm based in The Netherlands. 

From 2015 to 2018, Gilde led TenCate through a period of tremendous growth. Although we’d always been a customer-centric organization, our new owners pushed us to a new level, ensuring everything we did was focused on improving the customer experience… ” read more here

CUSTOMER SERVICE IS THE KEY TO OUR SUCCESS

TenCate Advanced Composites (through CCS Composites) is a valued supply chain partner offering compression molded parts, tailored to the demands of your application. Utilizing bulk molding compound (BMC) based on either thermoset or thermoplastic matrices, we offer part designers the flexibility to efficiently fabricate both highly specialized low-volume parts, as well as high-volume commercial parts.

TenCate has 20+ years of compression molding experience, backed by many achievements, such as supplying over 100,000 parts to the Boeing 737NG program alone. The key to our success is strong technical support. With our resin chemistry and BMC material expertise, we help our customers understand the vast engineering benefits and applications for compression molding in their operations to ensure success.

This article is a guide, created from our Expert Service’s years of experience helping first-time users understand where compression molding adds the most value. For additional guidance, please request a copy of the Compression Molding Design Guide on our website.

GENERAL FEATURE LIMITS AND TOLERANCE

CROSS MARKET FLEXIBILITY

TenCate Cetex® thermoplastic chopped tape is an ideal high-volume, cost-effective solution for diverse industrial applications, from under foot to under carriages. Thermoplastic parts can be designed with PP, PET, or PA6 chopped carbon or glass fibers and allow for:

> Tapered edges

> Variable thicknesses

> Variable rigidity

> Integral ribs and surface textures

Thermoplastic’s design freedom provides improved strength over normal injection-molded plastics while still allowing injection overmolding of fine details, such as clips or secondary features.

Thermoplastic composite parts can be fine-tuned for optimized mechanical properties and kitted for high volume production of hundreds per hour. Parts and tools can be designed with minimal flashing to minimize waste and to provide efficient post-processing to final form.

Call TenCate Performance Composites to discuss your part design with a thermoplastic composite expert. TenCate Performance Composites' legacy includes more than 200 million parts in industries as diverse as recreational footwear to consumer electronics to automotive applications.

UNI-DIRECTIONAL TAPE Manufacturing Expertise

Two thermoplastic uni-directional tape lines from our former Burlington, Ontario, Canada, facility were transferred to our Thermoplastic Center of Excellence in Morgan Hill, California, USA, significantly increasing the center’s product range.

The following thermoplastic UD tape products are now available from our Morgan Hill (USA) or Langley Mill (UK) customer service teams:

TenCate Cetex^® TC910 PA6, Carbon 131gsm FAW, 40% RC, 6.5”, Natural

TenCate Cetex^® TC910 PA6, Glass 262gsm FAW, 40% RC, 6.5”, Black

TenCate Cetex^® TC930 HDPE, Glass 352gsm FAW, 53% RC, 6.5”, Brown

TenCate Cetex^® TC940 PET, Glass 276gsm FAW, 40% RC, 6.5”, Black

TenCate Cetex^® TC960 PP, Glass 233gsm FAW, 40% RC, 6.5”, Black

The primary contact for North America/Asia/Pacific is Mary Jane Morris, Customer Service Manager, info@tcac-usa.com or call +1 408 776 0700. For Europe/Middle East/Africa please email tcacsales@tencate.com or call +44 1773 530899.

All consumer electronic laminates (TenCate Cetex^® TC920 PC/ABS), as well as footwear and orthotics laminates, will continue to be made and shipped from our Camarillo, California, USA facility. Please contact tcpcsales@tencate.com or call +1 805 482 1722.

Composites World interviewed key members of TenCate Advanced Composites’ Technology group for a recent blog post. In it they discussed thermoplastic tapes and the advancement of processing techniques such as in-situ consolidation. Here is a look at what we shared regarding which polymers and processing technologies we feel offer the best potential.

Abstract: Low Melt PAEK is a potential alternative to PEKK and PEEK in the quest for faster processing. Dr. Hans Luinge, director of Thermoplastic Composites Research and Product Development, recapped the difference in melt temperatures:

> TenCate Cetex® TC1225 Carbon fiber (CF)/LM PAEK tape 305°C (581°F)

> TenCate Cetex® TC1320 CF/PEKK tape 340°C (644°F)

> TenCate Cetex® TC1200 CF/PEEK tape 350°C (662°F)

“Cetex TC1225 LM PAEK was introduced in the TAPAS1 development program,” Luinge says. He shared how Airbus Nantes exhibited a fuselage panel with integrated stiffeners at the 2013 Paris Air Show. It was fabricated using the [TenCate Cetex® TC1225/Carbon] PAEK tape. Press-formed omega and butt-jointed T stringer elements made with automated fiber placement (AFP) were welded to the skin.

“Low-melt PAEK works well in AFP, stamp forming, and welding,” says TenCate Global Chief Technology Officer Scott Unger. He explained TC1225 LM PAEK holds promise for in-situ consolidation. There are two key factors to consider when choosing a product: tape quality and how well the matrix resin and fiber are distributed in the UD tape. 

“Our tape is extremely consistent with 0 to 0.5% voids maximum,” says TenCate Director of Expert Services EU Winand Kok. “Our tape thickness is also very consistent, which is why we can achieve very accurate ply thicknesses in consolidated laminates. This consistency is also important for thermoplastic welding processes and in-situ consolidation.” 

Read more here… 

Backing structures can be used to increase strength and stiffness on composite mold tools.

Key considerations when designing tooling backing structures include:

1. Tolerances: What are the demands from the final part design?
2. Environment: What are the processing conditions? E.g., ambient, oven, or autoclave.
3. Matching CTE: The backing structure should match as closely as possible to the tool.
4. Attitude: How is the mold tool presented for its primary function?
5. Airflow: This encourages even heat distribution.
6. Connection: Consider the interface and movement between the mold tool shell and its backing structure.

These considerations offer the best opportunity to match the physical properties of the mold and utilize standard products readily available to our customers, such as TenCate AmberTool HX42.

Choosing the “Egg Crate” Technique

A popular method for stiffening mold tools is the “Egg Crate” technique, where a cellular support structure is created with panels using materials similar to those used in the mold tool construction. Typical example: Carbon/epoxy prepreg mold panels could be made from monolithic carbon/epoxy prepreg laminates or sandwich panels utilizing carbon/epoxy skins.

Read on to learn more about backing structures…