Baristas mix coffee beans from different regions to produce blends with unique characteristics. A variety of factors affect flavor and aroma, including how long the beans are roasted and how finely they’re ground.
 
Likewise, companies that supply fillers and additives to composites manufacturers work with different materials to produce blends with a variety of performance characteristics. Alumina trihydrate (ATH) and calcium carbonate are two of the most common materials used by manufacturers to add bulk to parts, extend the resin and improve fire resistance.

Adjusting proportions of materials affects the filler’s characteristics and cost. Suppliers also modify the materials themselves by processing them in different ways: “You can modify surface areas, particle size distribution or modify the energy of the particle itself in order to lower the viscosity and lower the amount of resin used,” says Don Mills, ATH director of sales for Huber Engineered Materials, Atlanta.

Huber Engineered Materials is introducing three new fillers at its COMPOSITES+POLYCON booth based on these concepts. “The MoldX product line has been formulated to reduce the amount of resin demand,” Mills says.

The MoldX A series is a proprietary blend that Mills says is meant to improve products’ fire ratings.The MoldX C series is meant to help lower the cost of manufacturing parts. “It is blended calcium carbonate and ATH, and the intention is to allow you to get higher filler loadings in your current systems, maintain your current physical properties, and get more filler into the part and reduce the cost of the part,” he says. The MoldX W series utilizes a special grade of white ATH, used primarily in cast polymer applications and other products that require a translucent appearance.

For more information about Huber Engineered Materials and MoldX products, visit Booth 617 at the COMPOSITES+POLYCON Conference in Tampa, Jan. 15-17.

Bob Noble doesn’t hesitate when asked to project the future of environmentally conscious manufacturing. The CEO of Envision Solar, San Diego, Calif., has been following green trends for 30 years. “All of us who have been around for decades are surprised by how fast things are changing now,” he says. “There’s no reason to be focused on anything else, frankly. The comparative advantage that companies when they’re green or are moving in that direction are extraordinary.”

During an educational session at COMPOSITES+POLYCON 2009, Noble will talk about the role that composites can play in sustainable manufacturing. “This is a talk about the convergence of the inevitable future of clean technology growth in the United States and worldwide and the potential for composites,” he says. “Composites manufacturers—as soon as they have products that are green—they will be point to that project every time they present their work. I’ve seen architects who didn’t have any green products and then a client forced them to a very green project, and out of the hundreds of buildings they’ve done, that one project is what gets them new projects.”

Envision Solar integrates solar energy into buildings, and Noble has discovered that composites play a key role in the evolution of these buildings. “We’ve been in the process of developing designs with our consultant and contractor partners for composite structures, columns, trusses and others that have been made out of steel,” he says. “It appears that with composites, which are a quarter of the weight, it may be considerably less expensive to build these solar integrated buildings”

This session takes place Thursday, Jan. 15 from 4 p.m to 4:50 p.m. For more information, click here.

A panel of experts will review the regulatory landscape and answer questions about emissions and other topics during the session Composites Air Permit Workshop at COMPOSITES+POLYCON. Owners and employees of manufacturing and supplier companies who are responsible for environmental and regulatory compliance should attend the sessions, says Panelist Jack Benton, CEO of Benton and Associates, Lubbock, Texas. “We give a refresher of the regulations, a fine-tuning based on our dealings during the preceding year with regulators in various states,” he says. “We discuss how these regulations are being applied on a day-to-day basis and d how they’re being interpreted by the various regulatory agencies.”

The floor is open to questions from attendees. Benton also thinks some of the more pressing topics that come up will include the following:

• The impact of a ruling in Texas on odor and emissions.
• Clarification of MACT standards that affect composites shops.
• The future of legislative and regulatory activity, including the impact of a new Democratic administration and whether EPA will pursue enforcement more aggressively. 
•  The review of styrene and its potential health effects by regulatory agencies. 

The session takes place Thursday, Jan. 15 from 2 p.m. to 2:50 p.m. For more information, click here.

G.K. Mangelson hears horror stories like this one all the time: An affluent couple hired a professional to paint the interior of their home. The painter built scaffolding to reach the ceiling, but the scaffolding broke. The painter fell, injured himself, and then brought a lawsuit against the couple. “The fact the accident occurred in their home made them liable,” says Mangelson, a senior advisor for the American Society for Asset Protection (ASAP), Las Vegas. 

“The tort system is really weird today,” Mangelson says. “You don’t have to do anything wrong to be wiped out. You just have to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.” During his session Advanced Liability Protection Strategies at COMPOSITES+POLYCON 2009, Mangelson will offer advice to business owners in three key areas: Lawsuit protection, income tax reduction and estate planning. “Anybody who is running a business and has accumulated any kind of equity in their personal lives and in their businesses needs to attend this meeting,” he says.

The path to asset protection begins with proper titling. “One of the most misunderstood concepts is how to title your assets,” Mangelson says. “In other words, we have assets in our personal name or joint ownership, and that’s the worst kind of titling one can have if a person is interested in protection from lawsuits.” He’ll explain the advantages and disadvantages of different business entities and why he thinks LLPs and LLCs are the best.

Business owners often need to form more than one legal entity to protect their assets. Mangelson cites one example in which one partner in a business made a sexual remark to an employee. “Because the other partner was an owner too, the lawsuit included both of them, and they both lost the business,” he says. “You need to be to protect your personal assets, because even though they were both involved in the quagmire professionally, it shouldn’t have affected the one partner’s personal life the way it did.”

This session takes place Thursday, Jan. 15 from 10 a.m. to 10:50 a.m. For more information, click here.

COMPOSITES+POLYCON is one month away. To make sure you get the most out of your investment, ACMA has compiled a short list of things you should do beforehand to ensure a beneficial and enjoyable experience.

View the Show Website. Visit www.acmashow.org for all the up-to-date information you need to plan your trip. Our Conference department has spent countless hours finding deals for attendees, so take advantage of them. Venture past the show homepage to side tabs. There you will find exhibitor information, the conference program, maps—you can even make restaurant reservations!

Create a Game Plan. A show is meant to benefit your business, so make the most of the short amount of time you’re there. If you’re going alone, remember that you represent the interests of your entire company. At least one month before the show, sit down with fellow employees (remember their time schedule is not the same as yours) and review the exhibitor list. Discuss people they need you to contact, booths to visit, questions they would like you to ask and information they need you to gather or disseminate—and write it down!

Schedule ahead. If possible contact exhibitors ahead of time to schedule an appointment. The My Planner option of the Web site can help you find exhibitors and budget your time. Debbie Ayres, senior director of Membership at ACMA, also suggests looking at the attendee list. “See who you know and also who you want to know ahead of time, it will save fruitless searching and time at the actual show,” she says. Then, on your own, rank educational sessions that you would like to attend. Rank a few classes that you feel you can’t miss and have a back-up session in case the first is not what you expected.

Contact Information. Remember to leave the appropriate contact information with your coworkers and on your voicemail for clients who may call in your absence. To save yourself the post-business trip scramble, set your out-of-office reply to one day after you actually return. That way, your first day back is spent digging through emails without the expectation that you respond to everything in one day.

Check the weather. Before you pack, check your destination weather, and choose business casual appropriate clothing. Suitcases and shipping cost money, so use space wisely! Bring the right kind and the right amount of anything you need, and no more.

Manufacturers and designers with an interest in the defense market should attend Shawn Walsh’s education session called Development of Mass Efficient Warfighter Materials at COMPOSITES+POLYCON.

Walsh, who works at the Army Research Lab, headquartered in Adelphi, Md., will present a case study demonstrating how thermoplastics can be used in military applications, specifically helmet manufacturing. “What we quickly identified as the bottleneck wasn’t the material availability or the quality of the material,” Walsh says. “The missing link was twofold: a reliable thermoforming process specific to the ballistic thermoplastic materials and efficient preforming techniques to maximize performance and minimize touch labor and waste.”

The project resulted in thermoplastic-based helmets with a minimum 20 percent increase in ballistic mass efficiency. “The key is to do more with less,” Walsh says. “We’re always limited by the weight we can put on the soldier. We never want to encumber them more than we have to.”

Part of Walsh’s presentation will focus on how the military partners with industry to produce superior performing products. Formal partnerships are often facilitated through the Department of Defense’s Manufacturing Technology Program (ManTech). Large and small companies work through the program to solve manufacturing and design challenges that might otherwise not be commercially viable. “Some of these smaller companies are more aggressive and have novel approaches to thermoplastic forming,” Walsh says.

This session takes place Friday, Jan. 16 from 11 a.m. to 11:50 a.m. For more information, click here.

“You should look at a family business as the goose that lays a golden egg. It’s okay to cut up the egg, but you should preserve the goose,” says Chris Lansing, president and CEO of Lansing Building Products. At COMPOSITES+POLYCON 2009, Lansing will present an education session titled Preserving a Family-Owned Business, during which he’ll offer 10 maxims for running a family business successfully in turbulent times.

The first maxim: “Treat your family like a family, and your business like a business,” he says. Lansing, who is a second-generation owner of the 55-year-old company, learned many of his lessons during the first transition. Two of his four children now work for the company. “The owner of a business is typically president, CEO and chairman of the board, and he has a fiduciary duty to the business side,” Lansing says. “But he’s also the head of a family and has to continually balance and reconcile those competing issues.” One strategy involves hiring a family counselor or creating a Board of Directors that includes non-family members as means to communicating and solving conflicts. 

This session takes place on Thursday, Jan. 15 from  11 a.m. to 11:50 a.m. For more information, click here.

Ken Lipovsky, cast polymer application specialist at Reichhold Inc., has hosted Ask the Experts panels at COMPOSITES+POLYCON and regional events for the cast polymer and solid surface manufacturers for nearly 10 years. The format is simple, but it works. Manufacturers ask questions about any topic, and a group of industry leaders answers them. “There are always a lot of questions with regards to troubleshooting, but lately, it’s been a lot of business and marketing questions as well,” he says.

Attendees sometimes come with questions in hand, or the sessions they attend might prompt new questions. “If there are questions that people don’t feel comfortable asking in public, they can submit their questions ahead of time,” Lipovsky says. This year, his expert panel includes representatives from resin, filler, equipment and manufacturing companies.

The session takes place Friday, Jan. 16 from 9 a.m. to 9:50 a.m. For more information and a list of panelists, click here.

To submit questions ahead of time, email Ken at ken.lipovsky@reichhold.com.

Even as resin suppliers incorporate more bio-based material into their products, it doesn’t always make sense to use them, says Roman Loza, PhD, research fellow at Ashland Performance Materials. “Usually where it makes sense is when there’s some potential for marketing, like if you’d be selling tractors to farmers,” says Loza. He cites Ashland’s partnership with John Deere to incorporate bio-based resins in an SMC process to produce tractor hoods: “It was targeted to show farmers that their products are ending up in the equipment they’re using for harvesting.”
 
Other scenarios in which it may make economic sense to use ‘green’ products include government programs such as Bio-Preferred and the USGBC’s LEED program, where the use of the products is driven by incentives.

Otherwise, green products face challenges in getting adopted by the marketplace. Though end users pay lip service to environmentally friendly products, they hesitate to pay a premium for them and balk at changing their processes. Suppliers are working to accommodate those needs. “The consumers of our products, don’t want to invest a lot of time and effort and money to change their processes, so we’ve designed our products to be drop-ins to their existing processes,” says Loza.“They ask if there’s a price premium they’re going to have to pay to use green technology. The answer to that is ‘not necessarily.’ We try to price our green resins competitively with non-green resins.”

During the session Sustainability and Green Composites: Unsaturated Polyester Resins from Renewable Resources at COMPOSITES+POLYCON 2009, Loza will talk about bio-based resin alternatives, including Ashland's ENVIREZ products.

The session takes place Friday, Jan. 16 from 10 a.m. to 10:50 a.m. For more information, click here.

The Think Composites program, a continuing education partnership with the Boy Scouts of America, will take place at COMPOSITES+POLYCON 2009 in Tampa, Fla., on Saturday, January 17, 2009.

This year, Boy Scouts will make skateboards, tour the main hall and participate in PlastiVan activities. This event will count as partial credit towards their Composite Materials Merit Badge and Chemistry Merit Badge. Small group leaders and skateboard laminating demonstrators are needed to accompany the Boy Scouts between 8:30 a.m. and 1:00 p.m.

For information on volunteering, contact Lauren McCaughey at 703-525-0511 or email lmccaughey@acmanet.org.
 

Pretend that you’re not a composites manufacturer. Instead, imagine that you’re a surgeon about to operate on a patient. You reach for your scalpel, but it’s not there. It’s on the other side of the room. So you walk across the room to retrieve it. You walk back to your patient and make the first incision. You reach for a piece of gauze to soak up the blood. But there’s no gauze. It’s on the other side of the room. So you walk across the room again to retrieve it.

Your manufacturing operation may not be surgery, but the two scenarios are more in common than you think, says Liam Cahalane, industrial engineer at The Boeing Company. “If you’re a surgeon, you want all the necessary items you need to do the operation around you,” he says. “It’s the same concept for production. You want everything you need to build up the composite that you’re creating. You want the raw materials, the bagging, the tools, the tape, as close as possible, so you’re not wasting time walking to get whatever you need.”

Many manufacturers incur unnecessary costs by storing the materials they need far from the shop floor. Cahalane will illustrate how companies can reduce waste and optimize their production processes during an education session at COMPOSITES+POLYCON 2009.  The session, titled Utilizing a Capacitated Raw Material Storage to Minimize Manufacturing Cost, focuses on shop planning and lean manufacturing concepts, including point of use and push-pull production. 

“One of the major points of my presentation is not having warehouses so far away from where the work is actually getting done so you have to travel by foot or by cart to get the materials,” Cahalane says. “If you put the storeroom very close to where the work is being done, you can fill the items as the work is being done.” For example, at one company, Cahalane installed a freezer in the clean room to store small amounts of raw materials that needed refrigeration so they had everything they needed on site.

The benefits of this kind of production are obvious and relatively easy to measure, Cahalane adds: “It creates a low-cost production environment, where you can increase your throughput because people are actually working on what they’re supposed to be working on.”

Cahalane’s session takes place on Friday, Jan. 16 from 10:00 a.m  to 10:50 a.m.

Half the time, Kevin Spoo can tell what's wrong with a composites product just by looking at it. "Look for discolorations. Look to see if the glass is wet out with a simple dye penetrant. Look at the smoothness of surface--is it supposed to be that way? Sometimes you just put it up to your nose and smell it. All the senses are applied," he says.

As a senior scientist for Owens Corning, Spoo has solved a range of mysteries regarding bad products. Most often, he says, problems occur when manufacturers switch resins or fibers, or when they introduce a new design or personnel. "Most of the process engineers are younger folks who may not have seen a problem that some of the old guard has seen," he says. "The big thing is to find someone in the plant who has been around the block a few times."

Using real case studies, Spoo will share some of his problem-solving techniques during an educational session The Composite Detective: Troubleshooting Composite Problems at COMPOSITES+POLYCON 2009. "I'm going to go cover the primary tools," he says. "Experience is one tool, finding someone that knows more than you about composites. The second tool is to use a variety of ASTM standards," he says. He will also talk about more complex and expensive options, including scanning electron microscopy.

Among the case studies Spool will consider are the following real-life scenarios:
 

• A manufacturer noted that instead of the fibers turning clear in the resin, they stuck out like straws.
• A manufacturer saw blisters on the gel coasted surface
• Paint applied to a composites surface panel caused fish-eyes
• Pultruded parts cracked, and the fabricator did not get the mechanical performance he expected.

Spoo's presentation takes place Friday, Jan. 16 from 3 p.m. to 3:50 p.m. For more information, click here.

COMPOSITES+POLYCON 2007 attendees networked at the welcoming reception in Tampa. The 2009 opening reception takes place Thursday, Jan. 15 from 6 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. For more information, click here.