Cygnet Texkimp’s Gareth Davies explains how the company enables high levels of innovation, efficiency and sustainability in the manufacture of aerospace materials and parts using technologies that support qualification in an environment that reduces the speed of product development.

Composites technology specialist and fibre handling expert Cygnet Texkimp has been manufacturing machinery to process materials and components for the global aerospace market for 50 years. At its Cheshire-based Innovation Centre, the company’s multi-disciplinary engineering teams work in collaboration with materials developers and aircraft manufacturers to explore new manufacturing processes for the next generation of aircraft and spacecraft.

We knew when we opened our Innovation Centre at the beginning of 2023 that it would signal the start of a major new phase in our evolution as a leading technology partner to the aerospace industry. This 15,000ft² development, prototyping and testing space houses over £12 million of the most advanced fibre processing and component manufacturing technologies in the world, with machines from across our entire product range including creels, filament winding, prepreg, slitting and spooling, automation and recycling equipment. The centre provides us with a platform to showcase everything our technology can do and gives our partners a unique opportunity to engage fully in the development of new processing strategies for materials and parts before investing in the right machinery.

Our ambition has been to create an asset for the world’s composites and advanced materials industry; a place where we can help aerospace manufacturers and their intermediaries develop the most energy efficient and sustainable aircraft using next generation materials and processes that deliver the highest quality end products quickly and accurately. At the Innovation Centre, we can demonstrate how our technologies can be used to support lightweighting and electrification, improve process efficiency and product performance, reduce waste and revolutionise end-of-life management of composite materials and parts.

As part of a bespoke trial programme delivered with the support of our specialist engineering teams, aerospace companies can explore materials development, validate component design, prove concepts and build repeatability, consistency, accuracy and rate into their processes before investing in capital equipment or moving into full scale production.

In practical terms, companies can wind a hydrogen tank on our automated filament winding machine, manufacture high-quality thermoset and thermoplastic prepregs, slit high-grade tapes with extreme accuracy, and process composite parts using our ground-breaking fibre reclaiming and recycling solution.

With solutions for the manufacture of primary structure components and distribution, to technologies designed to increase lightweighting and range in electric and hydrogen-powered planes, eVTOL, vertical take-off, autonomous flight systems, and air taxis, we’re enabling manufacturers to design, test and prove concepts for the most innovative future flight programmes.

The essential elements

When it comes to achieving technical qualification for aerospace-grade materials and parts, we know that accuracy and repeatability are essential elements of the manufacturing process. We work closely with materials specialists to optimise the processing of raw materials in ways that are fast, repeatable, cost- and energy-efficient.

From prepregs to slit tapes, our machines are engineered to achieve the extremely high tolerances needed to repeatedly meet exact specifications including fibre tension, resin count, resin to weight ratio, and tape width. Our collaborative work takes us into the most advanced areas of materials engineering, where we’re supporting the development of new materials, such as ceramic fibres with optimal lightweighting capability at high temperatures for supersonic and hypersonic travel including unmanned rockets.

Our focus is to develop the technologies to make the lightest, thinnest, strongest, most durable speciality materials and parts to exactly the same design every single time, and to enable our partners to increase production rates to meet predicted volumes and future demands without compromising quality.

Take our High Volume 3D Weaving Composite Creel as an example. This carbon fibre weaving creel has been developed over several years of collaboration with aerospace manufacturers to enhance the way fibres are fed into a dynamic weaving process to manufacture precision aerospace components. The creel is designed to deliver consistent tension in individual zones, with the speed and tension of unwinding in each zone programmed according to the fibre count or weight and its ultimate position in the 3D form. The technology ensures fibres are guided into the right place in the weaving process to minimise fibre volume and achieve lightweighting objectives.

We’re also supporting the aerospace industry’s ambitions to achieve high-grade, lightweight, composites-intensive materials and parts through our prepreg innovation programme. In the last decade, we’ve designed and supplied more than 30 UD and fabric thermoset prepreg lines to the aerospace, automotive and industrial markets, making us one of the largest suppliers of thermoset prepreg technologies in the world. Our ambitious work in the field of thermoplastic prepregs has also led to the development of our Direct Melt Impregnation Thermoplastic Composite Line: the world’s first commercially available thermoplastic composite line capable of using the technique to process standard polymer, from polypropylene to PEEK, to create high-grade thermoplastic composite prepregs on an industrial scale.

In 2023, we expanded our prepreg capability further with the launch of the Multi Roll Stack: a short-footprint, energy-efficient prepreg processing solution designed to deliver more sustainable, lower-cost thermoset prepreg and towpreg materials. The machine features a novel configuration in which the compaction rollers are stacked vertically. This significantly shortens the machine’s footprint and the web path, which in turn cuts material wastage, removes the need for multiple drive motors and heaters, and reduces energy consumption and cost by more than half compared to conventional prepreg technologies, without compromising accuracy or consistency of the product or speed of throughput. Through detailed trials at our Innovation Centre, we’re able to showcase the Multi Roll Stack’s capability in achieving prepregs with optimal specifications at increased speeds with the potential to significantly reduce the initial capex investment and ongoing running costs.

Further downstream, our Slitter Spooler Rewinder has been engineered to achieve extremely high levels of accuracy, reliability and consistency in the slitting of continuous thermoset and thermoplastic UD carbon fibre prepreg to create slit tapes for the manufacture of critical aerospace components. This technology draws on decades of engineering expertise and understanding of material behaviour to deliver high-accuracy and uniformity slit tapes, consistently and reliably. Fundamental design features have been used to eliminate fraying or ‘stringers’ and ensure the machine runs continuously with minimal material scrappage or operational downtime.

Component manufacture

We’ve also developed a portfolio of machines to take these specialist materials and use them to manufacture high-performance aircraft parts, from fuel pipes to engine components and hydrogen vessels. For example, in the last decade we’ve grown our filament winding capability to include high speed, multi axis and 3D winding machines to wind a range of materials including dry fibres combined with an in-line wet-out system, thermoset towpregs and thermoplastic slit tapes.

Our Multi Axis Winder is designed to wind large-scale, continuous, tubular and curved aerospace components including aircraft wing spars and pipes at rate, out of autoclave and with reduced energy consumption. Unlike a conventional filament winding machine where fibres are wound onto a rotating mandrel, the Multi Axis Winder features rail-mounted rotating rings which move back, forth and around a static mandrel to create the required winding geometry. The static mandrel makes this technology truly innovative in a way that is transforming how large composite parts can be made in large volumes

Our High Tension Winding solution was developed to address the need to increase the strength and resistance of composite parts without adding weight or compromising fibre integrity. This technology is used to manufacture composite parts that perform well under intense forces, such as pressure, speed and rotation, with applications for electrification such as high-speed motors. Parts are overwrapped and banded under high tension to allow the finished part to spin more rapidly while keeping components stable. The technology is also being developed for the manufacture of pressure vessels, including hydrogen storage vessels, where winding at high tension delivers vessels that can withstand higher pressures.

Sustainable strategies

Strategies for achieving net zero targets are becoming well-established across the aerospace industry, and this has meant that enquiries for our technologies are increasingly focused on measures to improve sustainability. In 2022, we began developing a solution that would lower the life cycle impact of manufactured composite materials and parts by giving the fibres and resin polymers and matrices that go into making them not only a second life but the potential for multiple life cycles. Our objective is to give aerospace manufacturers a way of reducing the environmental impact of managing composite structures and parts at the end of their useable life, as well as the procurement and transportation of raw materials, by reclaiming high quality materials for reuse.

Our solution is built around the DEECOM green-tech materials reclamation solution created by our partner B&M Longworth and has been developed to enable the sustainable de-manufacture of composite materials and parts using a process that relies on pressurised steam – Pressolysis – to separate and reclaim constituent elements (fibres and polymer resins) in high-quality forms for reuse in the manufacture of new composites or in other industries. The technology was proven in trials with Boeing in 2011 and is attracting considerable interest from the aerospace market.

Sustainability and productivity will remain a major focus for the aerospace industry in the coming years. In terms of engineering, our role will be to support the industry with technologies that increase process efficiency and product performance, reduce waste and improve end-of-life management of composite materials and parts.

As one of the industry’s leading technology partners, our work will continue to focus on how we can produce the highest quality composite materials in the world more efficiently than ever before, to help manufacturers and end users proactively reduce their impact on the environment.

Cygnet Texkimp will be exhibiting at the Farnborough Airshow on NWAA and Composites UK’s stand in hall 1, stand 307.

www.cygnet-texkimp.com