Avient and Tight Line Composites have developed a carbon pultrusion technology without the need for peel ply. This method improves bond strength by 8%, cuts waste, reduces labor costs, and simplifies manufacturing.

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Allen Hall: Andrew and Brad, welcome to the show. Thanks for having us. Thank you. Well, we're gonna start off by talking about carbon protrusions, because that's the focus of your technology, title IX composites, and there's been some recent advancements that are really fascinating, but I, I kind of wanna go back a minute because carbon pull protrusions are the future, even though we're still making some fiberglass blades that'll have a limited lifespan.

We're gonna be moving to carbon protrusions because the strength and the weight. And the cost, simplicity of it, uh, just makes carbon protrusions the future. And Tightline Composites has been key in that mold of making these, uh, carbon planks and getting 'em out to industry. I. But one of the big problems with any sort of carbon plank product is it [00:01:00] usually has a peel ply.

And Andrew, you wanna talk about what that peel ply does and why it's used and why we need it. 

Andrew Davis: You really need that surface energy created by removing the peel ply to, to get an effective bond as you're building your spark cap. And so for years, this has just been considered a necessary evil. Uh, in terms of creating, creating that effective bond.

And, and that's, that's the world we've lived in for the last 10 years. 

Allen Hall: And a peel ply for those who are not deep into the composite industry. Peel, ply is a removable. Ply a fabric that's that's applied over the carbon on the outside and it's kind of thicker and it has, uh, this kind of rough and surface.

So when you build the protrusion, you got these two layers of this peel ply on either side, and it travels with the product. So as, uh, tight line sends out product, these, these peel plys go with it. [00:02:00] And ideally when they get to the factory, the, the people on the floor. Pull this peel play off and it's not fun to peel off one and two, it's kind of invisible.

So you can forget that it's there and install it in ablaze. And Joel, you have seen that in the field. You've seen protrusions where they have the ply still attached. 

Joel Saxum: Yeah, it's, it's like, um, Alan, we saw one of the other day too, where it was like there was still a coating on a down conductor, right? So like, if you.

If you try to embed this product, the, the idea behind peel and the peel ply is you peel the peel ply, and now you have a prepped surface that can be chemically and mechanically bonded to easier or in, in, in, in a much better way, as designed. So if you forget to pull that off, now you have a structural element inside the PLA or inside of whatever you may be building in composites.

That doesn't have the ability to bond properly to that protrusion, to that carbon plank or to that glass plank. Uh, and if that's the case, you lose, I can't [00:03:00] put a number to it. Right. But you lose an immense 

Andrew Davis: amount of structural strength. And Joel, just to underline your point, we've heard from customers who will remain nameless that it is, it, it happens that, that this will get caught on scan.

Uh, when the blade is completely done, and then the entire blade has to be scrapped. There's no, there's no fixing it.