The ideas behind the Composites for Europe forum program

The relaunch of Composites for Europe, a new event concept, also raises the question of how an industry event with an integrated impulse forum can develop an independent content profile.

For composites there are three central points to work on:

- Application orientation

- Sustainability

- Digitization

Application orientation

The prosperity of our society is based on technology and constant innovation. We experience an ongoing competition of technologies. Solutions based on composite materials that address a societal need, experience broad application and whose benefits enable further developments will be more successful and embody sustainability. Innovations along the process chain must ultimately increase the competitiveness of composite materials for the respective applications.

Sustainability

Looking at sustainability initiatives of our time, composites will be a central solution for many applications. Just two recent examples include the recently published renewable carbon initiative of the nova-institut and the study on cost-efficient and climate-friendly transformation strategies for the German energy system up to the year 2050 by Forschungszentrum Jülich.

Broken down to the content of a trade fair on composites, this means:

Composite materials will play an important role in enabling circular economies and will have to enable circularity as a material itself. In all cases, such solutions help to address the effects of climate change. Some examples for the first case would be wind power, energy storages (battery, hydrogen) etc. For the second case we see the rise and growing technological maturity of biocomposites or recycled composites. Composite solutions make a significant contribution to sustainability, especially in the construction and renovation of our infrastructure.

Digitalization

Jeff Sloan of compositesworld said in one of his last webinars: composites must now come of age.

Not only because I have worked on automation and digitization topics myself, I see these solutions as a central tool to overcome technological barriers in composites. The composite immanent properties increase the complexity in the product development process. The basic idea for lightweight design with composites 'The fiber follows the flow of force in the component' is often opposed by manufacturing considerations, unknown boundary conditions or just shortcuts in the development process. There is an enormous variety of technology paths available, the selection of which depends on an (for a single engineer) unmanageable number of parameters. Digitalization and automation is a central tool to increase the technological maturity of composite materials in all development and process steps.

I am therefore particularly pleased to be able to put together the session on digitization for composite materials with selected examples along the process chain. This will be accompanied by a large number of submissions to the poster session on the same topic.

In the next weeks I will present some special topics for the conference program I have put together with AVK that is now planned to run virtually along with AVKs Innovation Award.