Peel Ply Elimination in Carbon Pultrusion Tech

Avient and Tight Line Composites have developed a carbon pultrusion
technology without the need for peel ply. This method improves bond
strength by 8%, cuts waste, reduces labor costs, and simplifies
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YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the
show? Email us!  Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining
Light on Wind. Energy's brightest innovators. This is the progress
powering tomorrow. Allen Hall: Andrew and Brad, welcome to the
show. Thanks for having us. Thank you. Well, we're gonna start off
by talking about carbon protrusions, because that's the focus of
your technology, title IX composites, and there's been some recent
advancements that are really fascinating, but I, I kind of wanna go
back a minute because carbon pull protrusions are the future, even
though we're still making some fiberglass blades that'll have a
limited lifespan. We're gonna be moving to carbon protrusions
because the strength and the weight. And the cost, simplicity of
it, uh, just makes carbon protrusions the future. And Tightline
Composites has been key in that mold of making these, uh, carbon
planks and getting 'em out to industry. I. But one of the big
problems with any sort of carbon plank product is
it [00:01:00] usually has a peel ply. And Andrew, you
wanna talk about what that peel ply does and why it's used and why
we need it.  Andrew Davis: You really need that surface
energy created by removing the peel ply to, to get an effective
bond as you're building your spark cap. And so for years, this has
just been considered a necessary evil. Uh, in terms of creating,
creating that effective bond. And, and that's, that's the world
we've lived in for the last 10 years.  Allen Hall: And a
peel ply for those who are not deep into the composite industry.
Peel, ply is a removable. Ply a fabric that's that's applied over
the carbon on the outside and it's kind of thicker and it has, uh,
this kind of rough and surface. So when you build the protrusion,
you got these two layers of this peel ply on either side, and it
travels with the product. So as, uh, tight line sends out product,
these, these peel plys go with it. [00:02:00] And ideally
when they get to the factory, the, the people on the floor. Pull
this peel play off and it's not fun to peel off one and two, it's
kind of invisible. So you can forget that it's there and install it
in ablaze. And Joel, you have seen that in the field. You've seen
protrusions where they have the ply still attached.  Joel
Saxum: Yeah, it's, it's like, um, Alan, we saw one of the
other day too, where it was like there was still a coating on a
down conductor, right? So like, if you. If you try to embed this
product, the, the idea behind peel and the peel ply is you peel the
peel ply, and now you have a prepped surface that can be chemically
and mechanically bonded to easier or in, in, in, in a much better
way, as designed. So if you forget to pull that off, now you have a
structural element inside the PLA or inside of whatever you may be
building in composites. That doesn't have the ability to bond
properly to that protrusion, to that carbon plank or to that glass
plank. Uh, and if that's the case, you lose, I
can't [00:03:00] put a number to it. Right. But you lose
an immense  Andrew Davis: amount of structural strength.
And Joel, just to underline your point, we've heard from customers
who will remain nameless that it is, it, it happens that, that this
will get caught on scan. Uh, when the blade is completely done, and
then the entire blade has to be scrapped. There's no, there's no
fixing it.  Allen Hall: Yeah. That, that, that gets
expensive. Real quick, you're talking about a hundred thousand
dollars blades for onshore. Forget about offshore for a minute. An
offshore blade, multi times, is that three or four? Uh, so the,
the, the, the engineering is right. The protrusion is the right
answer and carbon is the right answer for blades, but it's really
comes down to getting. The peel ply and what, what do you wanna
deal with that? 'cause the other part of the peel ply is you just
create this waste cycle that peel ply gets just tossed into the
garbage. It's not a recyclable thing, it's one use and it's done.
So the, in the carbon protrusion world, if we can remove that peel
ply, that is huge, [00:04:00]gigantic. However, it is been
really hard to do that because there hasn't been any technology to
remove it, and we've been using it. Forever in aerospace and wind,
and that's where Brad comes in. And Brad's company has developed a
way to eliminate the Peel ply, which is a huge cost savings and a
labor savings and a, you know, a downstream savings. Brad, you
wanna under describe the, what you're bringing to Tightline and,
and how this technology works.  Brad Schmidt: So we do
protrusion within Aviant as well, and we've developed this over the
last four or five years and have been using it internally. For our
own glass profiles, um, in, in various markets, including wind. Um,
but essentially, yes, have eliminated the need for these glass
protrusions to, uh, you know, require peel, ply or alternatively
sanding or some sort of grinding process prior to, um, adhesion. So
the, it is, it is actually in the chemistry of
the [00:05:00] resin system. It's not a surface treatment
and it is throughout the part. Um, so if you cut the, you know,
through apart that same adhesion, uh, you know, or bond strength
will be realized throughout the, the Matrix. It's not just on the
surface. Um, so again, we've been using this in-house for a number
of years. We've known the Tightline team for some time, and we
approach them. Late last year, uh, about six months ago, let's say.
And um, obviously there was a lot of interest in tightline. There
was a lot of skepticism at first in that, uh, this would even work,
but they were willing to give it a try. So we sent them a small
batch of resin with this, call it an additive in it. They ran some
trials and then we tested in our lab, uh, did the lap shear testing
on a traditional, uh, carbon plank with peel ply. And then a
protruded plank without peel ply. With this new chemistry, we saw
on average about an 8% [00:06:00] improved improvement in
bond strength in the, with the chemistry versus the traditional
peel ply, and a much tighter standard deviation in that bond
strength.  Joel Saxum: So let me, let me, let me get this
straight. So you not only have removed waste, removed the cost of
those, the procuring of the PO ply materials. Increase the ability
for manufacturing processes to be correct and at the same time have
improved the strength of the bond. That's right.  Brad
Schmidt: Yeah. I mean, um, and seems too good to be true,
right? And we're trying to find out where this doesn't work, but,
but we haven't, yeah, we have not been able to poke holes in it
yet. Um, and then on the mechanical property side, uh, they've
actually seen a slight improvement. Um, and in theory now without
Peel ply, you can add a bit more carbon. Where the PO ply would've
previously taken up space in the dye. Right. Um, and the additive
is, is at a very low concentration, so it's had no detrimental
effects on any of the mechanical. Properties.  Allen
Hall: That is amazing. So [00:07:00] obviously the
first question that any composite engineer is gonna ask is, well,
it, it's a resin change, right? So I gotta requalify the material.
But it's not really a resin change are you're still using the same
resin system. Correct. So it is, it is it. Is it a magic powder or
a chemical treatment to the existing resin system? And I, you know,
composite engineers are always weary of change, right? If they have
something they, that they know, they tested, it's been through all
the processes and all the approvals, and now you wanna make a
change. So the, the always the answer is no, which is crazy because
if, if you're improving it and you can show it and you have the
data to back it up, and Ian's gonna do that. You can use the same
resin system, just add a little bit of technology to it to remove
peel ply, and, and that's the approach. So it's not a, um, it's not
a wholesale change in the resin system or the strength of the
system. It is in the, the surface energy piece. That technology is
pretty transferrable, right? I mean, [00:08:00] pretty
much anybody with an existing resin system can use this technology,
right?  Brad Schmidt: Yeah, absolutely. So we developed
this originally in a vinyl Lester system. We've since proven it out
in, um, developed it in polyester as well as epoxy, which is used
in the, uh, the carbon poulation process for the planks. Um. So
it's absolutely transferrable. Like I said, it's at a very low
concentration, so it is the same base resin system just with our,
uh, you know, magic powder as you referred to. And I think 
Joel Saxum: I ask you a, a, a question that's a little bit.
Um, so we were talking about carbon protrusions and other kind of
protrusion, cla protrusions and different vinyl es the things that
you've done in the pultrusion space. This is fantastic. However,
let me ask you another question. If this is mixed with a resin
system, where else can it be used? Can it be used in repairs? Could
it be used in, I know like one of the things that happens in wind
right now, Alan and I talked too about it regularly, is these root
bushing pullout things and there's a couple companies working on
Gulf wind [00:09:00] technology. We foresee there's some
people working on fixes for these.