The Company’s patented Fiberforge solutions will revolutionize the use of composite materials in structural applications traditionally served by light metals or other materials. Fiberforge overcomes fundamental barriers that have kept advanced composites from penetrating into high-volume and cost sensitive applications.

The Fiberforge solution combines the desirable benefits of hand lay-up and automated approaches to molding composites. It achieves the high degree of fiber alignment and fiber fraction attained with hand lay-up techniques, but in a highly automated, high-volume process. Fiberforge maximizes its customers’ utilization of expensive technical fibers, allowing them to build high-performance structural parts in high volumes at low cost.

This automated process first creates a flat, tailored blank, uniquely designed for each part, which can then be pressed into shape using compression molding. The high degree of automation in the Fiberforge process will achieve the repeatability, rate, cost, and accuracy required for high-volume production applications. The tailored blank approach allows the machinery to orient the fibers cost-effectively in the best possible way to achieve high structural performance in the final part all while minimizing scrap.

To further achieve cost-effectiveness, Fiberforge is under development of a process that incorporates the lowest-cost starting materials in bulk form, such as continuous carbon tow and un-reinforced thermoplastic, into the existing automated process with minimal “touch labor” per part with very little performance "knock-down."

The Company is developing core competencies in two areas:

1. Internally focused: developing the Fiberforge process, processing data, equipment, and attendant technologies that make Fiberforge a turn-key solution.
2. Externally focused: product design, development, application, prototyping, and short-run production expertise that make Fiberforge a partner of choice for customers who desire to make thermoplastic advanced-composite structures.