Lineat and SHD Composites win 2024 Composites UK 'Innovation in Composite Materials' award
Lineat Composites Limited (Lineat) and SHD Composites Ltd (SHD) have won the prestigious Composites UK Innovation in Composite Materials award for their collaborative effort bringing advanced aligned recycled carbon fibre pre-preg materials to the composite market. Lineat is a leading sustainable technology company with a patented novel, and scalable, manufacturing technology that takes low value carbon fibre waste, and re-aligns them into a new highly aligned fibre tape that mimics continuous fibres UD material (AFFT™). SHD is a global manufacturer of advanced composite prepregs with a strong focus on enhancing sustainability and material circularity, offering prepreg with natural fibres and bio-resins to the market today.
Both companies are raising the bar for sustainable composites, aiming for maximum performance with minimal carbon footprint. Since signing a head of terms in 2023, the companies’ have combined their expertise and capabilities in an innovative and flexible solution for manufacturing recycled aligned carbon fibre tape.
Lineat has developed a new dry format of its aligned fibre material, stabilising it with a proprietary binder technology to make it spoolable under tension. SHD used their advanced machinery to feed and combine the aligned fibre tapes into a wider and thicker aligned fibre prepreg material.
This joint effort opens up a new route for recycled carbon fibre prepreg production at different thickness, width and with a variety of resin films to meet customer demands.
“One of the hardest challenges in new material development is to make it fit in existing supply chains. The dry aligned fibre tape development and advanced pre-pregging success by SHD is a huge milestone to solve this challenge, ultimately enhancing material production efficiency for all stakeholders through this collaboration.” Lourens Blok, CTO at Lineat Composites
“Collaborations like these will deliver the next generation material that the composites industry is screaming out for. Much like its form, the CompositesUK award represents the tip of the iceberg, underpinned by the innovation, hard work and dedication of both companies.” Ben Andrews, Product Technology Manager at SHD Composites
